Resident Evil Reboot Will Be Heavily Inspired By John Carpenter

Announcing a Resident Evil reboot just months after the final installment in a six-film series that became the highest-grossing video game franchise in cinematic history hit theaters was a risky proposition, but the upcoming Welcome to Raccoon City is promising to be an altogether different beast from the sci-fi action horrors steered by Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich.

Over the course of fourteen years, Anderson and Jovovich’s Resident Evil efforts drew tepid reviews from critics, but the box office numbers made it pretty clear that there was a huge appetite from fans to see more, even though the films didn’t stick particularly closely to the source material. Reinventing the property and hewing much closer to the atmospheric template set on consoles was the next logical step, then, and director Johannes Roberts has assembled a solid cast of veteran character actors and up and coming talents.

The September 3rd release date was locked in a while ago, but the official subtitle was only announced yesterday, and along with the reveal Roberts shared some new information about his fresh spin on Resident Evil, including where he’s hoping to draw his inspiration.

“I’m a huge John Carpenter fan and I really took to that. The way he tells these claustrophobic siege movies and I took movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog and these disparate group of characters coming together under siege, and I took that as my filmic inspiration.”

There are far worse places to find inspiration for a tension-fuelled exercise in horror than peak John Carpenter, who continues to exert his influence over the genre despite his decade-long sabbatical from directing. Refitting Resident Evil as a siege movie is an interesting notion, too, one that hopefully puts the characters at the forefront instead of simply relying on recognizable iconography and jump scares at the expense of the narrative.

Fans of the games will already be firmly on board for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, but the real challenge comes with enticing causal audiences and convincing them that the reboot is worth their time and money.