July 17, 2021|

Filed under: Editorial

Holism: How Resident Evil Village Went Off-Brand

This article goes into mild details about the plot and setting of Resident Evil Village. I have, however, tried to present them in a way that shouldn’t break the game’s surprises.

Resident Evil knows about shaking things up. Over the course of two decades, Capcom’s legendary survival horror franchise has mutated as many times as the grisly monsters it’s concocted. It has revolutionized video game horror, shooter mechanics, even mechanical systems for saving. It had a successful film franchise that cast out most of the series’ tropes and improvised new ones, along with less successful animated movies and an alternate universe series of novels. It’s getting a new film, an upcoming Netflix show starring my fave Lance Reddick, and surely many more adaptations, sequels, and spinoffs in the years to come.

Resident Evil is big business, and like most businesses, it sells a variety of tones, looks, and styles. Prefer something traditionally scary? Well, here’s the sumptuous remake of the first game! Want more action? Resident Evil 4, which pretty much reinvented the third person shooter, has you covered! Not action-y enough? We’ve got movies! Want to play something that’s just really bad? Oh, does Capcom have options for you. While Resident Evil 6, often cited as the worst mainline entry of the series, tried and failed to be all things to all people, the brand as a whole was kind of already there.

From Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the second (and worst) live action movie. Some fans bristle at the divergent narrative in the films, but they still made bank.

The newest major brand extension came from Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, a 2017 soft reboot that clamped down on RE6’s and the series’ most bloated, action-oriented vices. While it went back somewhat to the series’ roots – in that it trapped its hero, tired everyman Ethan Winters, in a spooky mansion – it was also stunningly fresh. It used a first person perspective to up the intensity, defining its hero through his constantly injured hands. Those injuries, a metric ton of gruesome imagery, and a sweaty Louisiana setting gave it this nasty, visceral feel. But its smartest play was in its villains; while it featured generic mold enemies, Ethan spent most of his time hunted by a demented family oozing more energy and personality than almost any series foe to date. It was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets Evil Dead 2. It was revelatory and new. And after it was complimented by a fantastic (and far more traditional) Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019, excitement was high for what new ideas Resident Evil 8 might bring to the table.

Resident Evil 7’s chainsaw duel. Oddly reminiscent of the both the Clock Tower Scissorman and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’s own chainsaw duel. RIP Dennis Hopper.

Still, the June 2020 announcement trailer for Resident Evil Village (or VII.I.age; this is firmly Resident Evil 8) made quite the shock. The game kept the first-person view and hero from RE7, but almost everything else was notably bizarre. Its setting was a remote, snowy town in Eastern Europe, one with a castle and – in a rarity for the series – a community of frightened denizens. It had a hazy, murky sense of time and space. It ended with the series’ most prolific hero, Chris Redfield, brutally murdering Ethan’s wife. And, well… it had werewolves! And a creepy children’s story! And a hairy, vaguely mountain man-ish German guy! And successive trailers showed off even more, notably a bevy of vampires. It was beyond the pale.

Because the thing is, “that” stuff – magical and fantasy horror – “isn’t” Resident Evil. Unlike its wholly supernatural rival Silent Hill, or Castlevania’s grab bag of source material, Resident Evil sits firmly in the realm of science fiction. Its values and fears orbit around the dangers of scientific misuse and abuse. It’s not just that there are zombies; the zombies are byproducts of a pharmaceutical corporation trying to make and sell bioweapons. The worst company of the lot was founded by a eugenicist and started its work by kicking an African tribe off their land. The monsters invariably go berserk, causing a cascade of violence that threatens everyone in their vicinity. In virtually every installment, this idea crops up; threats are built by industry or government or terrorism, and they only get put down after a high body count. There’s always an explanation and a cause, and it’s your job – as a cop, an investigator, a victim, but almost always a member of an institution – to expose it.

Barry and Jill explore the evil lab in Resident Evil. There’s always an evil lab.

This wasn’t a full first for the series, however. The last game also used surreal trailers, for one thing, and opulent castles is a series trope. But most of all, the landmark Resident Evil 4 did this all the way back in 2005. It also was set in a rural European village and castle, and it dramatically replaced the series’ zombies (and their creator, pharmaceutical giant Umbrella) with something more akin to early Lovecraft. The bad guys were a backwoods cult, complete with an evil priest and monstrosities from European folklore. But there was still a scientific explanation: they were controlled by a parasite, a flea loosely inspired by real life flukeworms and flatworms. The giants and lake monsters? Just people or animals mutated in experiments. Giving an answer didn’t make the monsters less scary; it just contextualized them (and besides, the game had rejected a supernatural, ghostly premise during development).

The Ganados were scary partially because they were such a big jump. But one game later, the idea had already been codified and reused. What was foreign became familiar.

I think that this pushback, this attempt to keep the purely supernatural out of Resident Evil makes sense. Those tropes would probably muddle the series’ oddly consistent political message, one that places business, institutions, even royalty as the real danger and the monsters as just their tools gone amok. Even 4, which was an absurd romp with marching Napoleon statues and a jet ski escape from an exploding island, still fell back to that; the evil cultists were just vaguely anti-American terrorists using bioweapons to get a leg up. When review copies of the new Netflix film Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness were sent out, it came with a request that critics not relate any of its plot points – such as a nationalist American politician falsely claiming that the Chinese government manufactured a zombie virus – to real world politics. It’s absurd no matter what, but especially for that movie and that series.

It’s not just the politics, though. The kind of horror just is what Resident Evil is. The series always looked at horror films (Night of the Living Dead, The Shining, Zombi 2), but also American cop and military movies. Their monsters are scary, but still made by people – which means they can be defeated. That means scrounging bullets or solving traps. Often, the greatest obstacles are things like deliberately confusing control schemes or scarce resources. Theoretically “normal” buildings are blocked off with goofy puzzles involving clocks and statues and friezes, but always with the quick justification that they had eccentric architects. With enough research, the hows will always appear. Village director Morimasa Sato stated as much in an interview with Sony’s PlayStation Blog. It’s just how things work by Raccoon City.

An optional puzzle in the RE2 remake: get a gun from a safe box that needs a key connected to a badge inside a book that can only be opened with the jewel from a scepter held by a statue that only releases it by finding it another hand.

And so, Village, which puts as its biggest inspiration Gothic horror – a genre that’s kind of an antithesis to those values. I should be upfront that the game does in fact provide explanations for its ostensibly non-scientific creatures. It does the work to not break the rules but to look like it’s breaking them. The game knows it’s playing with a different set of toys, and even before I started playing, that premise was my biggest point of interest. As it turns out, Capcom delivered.

It starts with – well, actually, it starts with a gorgeous animated intro that feels totally alien to this franchise, one that suggests a more chilling fairy tale than the series’ usual goopy mix of rot, mud, and bodily fluids. But after that and the dramatic villain turn of longtime RE mascot Chris, it makes a shorter leap from convention into the village itself. From the start, critics and audiences zeroed in on how it all felt a bit like Resident Evil 4, one of those feathers in the series’ cap. That was the case; production on Village started by developing a town setting reminiscent of RE4, which opened with a famous village battle (something Village itself homages). But the differences still come through. For one thing, it’s usually not freezing in these games.

More importantly is that unlike RE4, you return to the village, repeatedly. That game had short sandbox-y sections, but it was otherwise very linear. Village is much more interested in letting Ethan return to the main, quiet town multiple times. Given the differences between sandbox design (which emphasizes mastery and control over a space) and horror (which looks at that control with healthy disdain), the game does a few tricks to keep players on their toes. You can’t return to other major locations after finishing them, the clever level design blocks and opens paths as the story goes on, there are a few optional areas, and the town gets cosmetic changes. Resident Evil is known for its lived-in, exploratory settings, but the openness and size feel distant from the packed Raccoon Police Station or Spencer Mansion. Those areas were scary for being closed; this one is scary for being vast (and, well, also being closed).

You know, it is interesting how (relatively) infrequently Resident Evil goes to the beloved “snow level” well. It’s this, Code Veronica, a bit of 6 and Revelations, and otherwise not much.

But, really, it’s all about the Gothic monsters. That’s what the game sold first and foremost; that’s where it tries the hardest to move from series conventions. The day players are, of course, the werewolves that act as the main enemy type. They’re similar to the smarter, assertive Ganados from RE4, but, well, they’re werewolves just peacocking their magical werewolf glory (the game calls them “lycans,” but the blunter term feels right). There’s also the villain, a creepy, mysterious cult leader with the imagery of six crow wings. She’s even backed by a creepy priestess who gets up in your face every so often. The biggest, though, are the leader’s four capos: a nine-foot tall noblewoman who drinks blood and surrounds herself with three murderous daughters, a shrouded woman attending to a creepy living doll, a hideous and tragic human-fish hybrid, and that at least werewolf-adjacent Teutonic hillbilly.

This meant that not only is Resident Evil enjoying Gothic horror, it’s enjoying old timey Universal Studios horror – and its thematically close but legally distinct counterparts. Altogether, there’s vampires, witches, werewolves, creatures from the Black Lagoon, ghosts, Frankenstein monsters, Chucky, dragons, gargoyles, and even a less viral, more ghoulish take on the living dead. It’s only missing an invisible man, an Egyptian mummy, and Abbott & Costello.

Well, here’s my hopes for the DLC.

This is, however, a game already playing with these tropes (and how to fit them into its established rules), so it’s more than happy to twist them. Lady Dimitrescu, the giantess vampire, draws from Dracula (both literary and Castlevania vintages), Carmilla, tales of Elizabeth Bathory, but she also has a Freddy Krueger claw and a 1960’s fashion sense. Her daughters are ersatz versions of the brides of Dracula, but they dress like witches, and instead of turning into bats or rats, they morph into a swarm of bugs. They’ve got a weakness that seems to be light… but might not be. Even if you’re coming in just for the Gothic stuff, you’re likely to get a few curveballs.

The others are a bit less frequent in their jumps off script, but the jumps do exist. Donna Beneviento and her doll, Angie, have surreal and ghostly powers at odds with how almost every monster of this series has ever acted. Moreau the gill man has a name and occupation that bring to mind The Island of Dr. Moreau, and he also evokes both Lovecraftian sea monsters and Japanese kappa, but he’s also got a more wild and frenetic boss fight than those might imply. Heisenberg, the mountain man and orchestrator of werewolf mosh pits, enjoys a wide variety of unrelated archetypes held together by a loopy, Nicolas Cage-y cadence. These fault lines crack across this monster mash, from horseback wolfmen to a wonderfully over the top riff on RE4’s chainsaw guy. One foe in the game actually has, and this still shocks and delights me, Magneto powers. Have you ever seen Magneto powers in Gothic horror? Probably not, but now you can.

Donna’s outfit brings to mind bunraku puppet theater and the “hidden mothers” of Victorian photography, while Angie’s scars and dress make her look like a literal “Bride of Chucky.”

There is, of course, a difference between simply making these breaks – ones that are as jarring for Gothic horror as they are for Resident Evil – and using the breaks for more thematically compelling ends. Again, Village has to integrate all of this into its, pardon the pun, umbrella, and while the breaks made these tropes distinct, they aren’t enough on their own. Neither are the “scientific” explanations for why a person can vomit more sludge than their body weight in one go or, you know, be a talking doll. The game needs to have them there at the base, but it also needs to use additional devices. I’ve currently narrowed them down to about four – just like the Lords.

The first, and most important, is showing that these new tropes can do things the established tropes can’t. One sequence, for instance, uses its foggy, nightmarish space to pit Ethan against his deep seated fears, which the villains warp into a carnival of grotesqueries. The values and politics of Resident Evil don’t really have space for that kind of emotional storytelling, so a narratively foreign environment can act as that space. It also allows the game to make stories, gameplay, and experiences that are new for its world.

This also leads to new environments – and new takes on ones the series has already explored.

From that comes the second, strong pacing. Village knows exactly which areas it wants to be big, which it wants to be small, and how those all interplay. I don’t mean that it just does “big area, small area, repeat” (though it doesn’t stack long sections, thankfully); it’s impeccable at giving you a different feel at every turn. Each narrative arc plays with the amount of gunplay, though the game does largely go from disempowerment and terror to more thrilling, tense action. This ensures that none of the individual “off brand” sections dominates the story, the atmosphere, or each other; they all stay subordinate to the whole. Capcom staffers called the game a “theme park of horror,” a format that rarely does its aspects justice. Previous Resident Evils (i.e. RE6) have failed to wield it. I don’t think Village is perfectly elegant at it – there probably could have been more breaks in the action – but it does work. And thankfully, the mixing and control buttress everything.

Yep, that’s another statue! One of Village’s early sections sends Ethan into a castle that captures the joys of both classic Resident Evil exploration and RE7‘s mansion chases.

The third is by injecting it all with a splurge of personality. This is a story of big, outsized characters, and while Resident Evil has always had those, its maniacal supervillains take a backseat to ugly monstrosities when it comes to time in the spotlight. In an evolution of what RE7 did, Village instead decides that time would be better spent with its talkative bad guys. They’re all incredibly fun and charismatic, but they also conjure this sense of place and history and honest, emotional pain. Most importantly, they all go through distinct narrative arcs as Ethan confronts them. Even Ethan himself – a character who was, not unfairly, derided as a boring protagonist in the last game – gets more pathos and depth. He’s still saddled with the adventure’s blandest and least satisfying dialogue, but the game taps into the compelling idea of him as a survivor who thinks himself a hero but doesn’t quite shape up. It lets him bounce off the theatrical lunatics hunting him. Making them big, giving them space, letting them experience drama; these characters and events are given roles beyond just quick, easy references. Those roles also tap into Resident Evil iconography, letting both sides coexist.

All four Lords are tragic in their own ways, but none more so than Moreau, a man cursed to be physically grotesque, feared and loathed, denigrated by his own family, and utterly lacking in self-worth.

And that’s tied to the final – and most important – part, synthesizing the Gothic stuff by baking it into the series, and that means adding it to Resident Evil’s insane, convoluted backstory. Even casual fans noticed the eight sided symbol that’s all over the village and the trailers. It’s the logo of the Umbrella Corporation, the symbol of everything evil – murder for profit, unchecked experimentation, eugenics – within the series’ world. Even after being destroyed almost two decades before the plot of Village, its shadow exists. Sometimes, that comes from rival organizations or its own scientists gone rogue (the most prominent being longtime villain Albert Wesker, who shockingly doesn’t get a reference in this one). Sometimes, it’s just as symbolism. In this case, without saying too much, the game does reveal its story and players as firmly within the franchise’s history. Unlike RE4, which presented its bad guys as outside the established mythology, Village wants it clear that its abnormal ideas don’t just fit Resident Evil; they can help define it. Ethan’s sojourn to Romania is no outlier, and neither is the shadowy Mother Miranda.

The Umbrella logo, just… out in the open. The symbols of the Four Lords surround it, almost like it’s being clutched by a claw.

Of course, being part of Resident Evil is about more than just plot, and Village makes sure to connect to its series in one other big way: being abundantly silly. In every entry, Resident Evil is phenomenally goofy and zany. You heal by noshing on giant green herbs. The dialogue is surreal and inscrutable. Chris’s most iconic moment is punching a boulder into a makeshift bridge inside an active volcano. And it was supposed to be dramatic! For all its scares, Village posits itself as the apex of that silliness. The obscenely over the top violence Ethan suffers becomes a running joke. His diary recaps of the plot have this hilariously dumb macho posturing for his own benefit (it’s also a character beat, but describing a man who attacked, kidnapped, and forced him into a gladiatorial arena as a “hammer wielding asshole” is just funny). Chris’s secret military unit is the “Hound Wolf Squad,” a name that’s still making me cackle. These invincible supervillains? They’re comically neurotic. What we lost in laughably bad voice acting and stilted storytelling, we gained in dysfunctional sitcom hijinks. Which also showed up in RE7!

Both theatrically villainous and deluded about his own morality, Heisenberg is the villain who goes to the goofy well most of all. Honestly, that he worked at all, let alone ended up a great character, is a small miracle on its own.

Those are the cornerstones of this endeavor: taking unfamiliar ideas, twisting them, inflating them, and always suggesting that they can be familiar. Even if the game pulls back and gives the reason for why people turn into werewolves or live on drinking blood, it doesn’t treat it as a “gotcha” moment. Village puts them as front and center as Ethan’s hands – the only parts of him you ever see, so naturally the parts that get brutalized more than anything else in the whole game – and shreds expectations of them with loving gusto. The game clearly relishes the chance to cut loose with these influences and justify their place.

As a Wolfman, I can confirm this is a very realistic image.

Also, it’s not just folklore or movies; Resident Evil Village drinks deep from the well of video games, even ones that “shouldn’t” fit Resident Evil. Perhaps calling its antagonists the “Four Lords” is a bit of a giveaway for one potential influence: Dark Souls, which also sent you off to kill four Lords for the sake of a vessel. Certainly the whole locale feels similar to Yharnam, the dying city of Souls’ sister game Bloodborne. Or, as the AV Club’s A.A. Dowd posits, maybe they’re tributes to all the eccentric teams who bedeviled the heroes of Metal Gear Solid? One enemy’s design hews disquietingly close to the look of a Final Fantasy end boss. A late sojourn into full-on action is a better version of both Resident Evil 5 and the military games that inspired it, and one expanded feature – the crafting in RE7, which bizarrely now includes cooking – is the series putting more stock into a medium-wide standard. The game’s reach is wide.

This also led to Village’s fun new mini-game: a series of lovingly detailed ball labyrinths.

But no one gaming influence hits harder than P.T., the tragically lost short game by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. It’s the primary inspiration for Village’s single most unique, distinct, and “un-Resident Evil” section. Judging from the critical discussion, it’s its most acclaimed sequence – or, at the very least, one of its most prominent topics of discussion beyond the immensely popular Lords. Suffice it to say that as much as it may be derivative of P.T. (and I don’t think that’s inherently a problem), it feels alive because of it, yet another Resident Evil moment of upping the ante and showing why it’s the king of horror in games. It took an idea from outside, assimilated it, and made it its own with seemingly no trouble.

Perhaps that’s the best way to conclude this, a statement of incorporation. Resident Evil Village knew that it wanted these cultural touchstones. It also knew that they were incompatible with what Resident Evil is all about. So instead of simply doing the sensible thing (i.e. backing away and grabbing more fitting source material), it decided to instead ask “this cannot work – so how can we make it work?” It added a few twists and adornments where it needed, but it also knew to ask why it should be included at all, what it contributed beyond raiding the coffins of a few old monsters.

And even when it mostly just reuses an idea, like the spooky but fairly traditional evil priestess, it goes all-in.

That incorporation also meant dragging in material from across its own complicated and mixed history. In general, its remix of Resident Evil 4 is so strong that I wonder if it’ll kill some of the momentum of the long rumored – and seemingly unnecessary – RE4 remake. And, naturally, as a sequel to RE7 it politely codifies that game as more than a weird, Southern-fried outlier by remixing and exploring its ideas. But it also plays with the series’ more controversial military thriller stories (with one of their dopiest moments getting a particularly funny callback), while roping in the interwoven conspiracies of the first five games. It kind of redeems RE6’s older “theme park” approach, in a way.

Resident Evil 6 promised a variety of tones and styles and ideas, but all four stories were just varieties of bloat and bombast. Village basically does what 6 sold, but so much better in every way.

This combination of old and new, treasuring of the familiar while inviting in the markedly different, is necessary for any series – especially one as long in the tooth as this one. It’s exciting and fun to see it in action, but it’s a path Resident Evil, which has had as many false starts and boondoggles as classics, needs going forward. And that’s true both in general, and, more specifically, for a prospective Resident Evil 9. Village ends with a post-credits stinger that both hints at a wild shift for the series and borrows plot points the franchise as a whole has already explored at length. The same, and different. If those ideas are going to work, they’ll likely need to do more than just pull in what’s already worked and retool what hasn’t. It may need to go to far off lands and bring something back. But while I’m not immediately confident in whatever comes from that – again, this is a franchise with a rocky history – I do think Village shows a strong path forward. What new, tonally at odds horror genres could the series take now? Italian giallo? J-horror? Creepypasta? From where we are now, the horizon seems limitless. Maybe a bit crowded with gargoyles, but limitless nonetheless.