RESIDENT EVIL Director Zach Cregger Reveals His Top 4 Video Games of All Time

Zach Cregger, director of the upcoming Resident Evil movie, recently accepted the challenge of listing his top four favorite video games, and his picks make it pretty clear the guy knows his games.

During an interview with Regal Movies, Cregger was asked to fire off his personal top four. He came up with a killer mix of horror, punishing action, and one particularly miserable trip through a post-apocalyptic America.

"Off the top of my head: Binding of Issac, Dark Souls 3, I would say Resident Evil 4, and, God, my last one? This is brutal. The Last of Us 2."

That’s a pretty good group of games, and it also helps explain some of the sensibilities Cregger is bringing to Resident Evil.

The inclusion of Resident Evil 4 certainly isn’t a surprise. Cregger has previously talked about pulling inspiration from that game for his movie, and the film even contains a Resident Evil 4 Easter egg.

He also gave star Austin Abrams some homework before filming, telling the actor to play Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 4, and Resident Evil 7. Each of those games has contributed something to Cregger’s approach.

The new movie takes place parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2, while Cregger previously explained that he incorporated "character elements" from Resident Evil 7. Rather than directly adapting one particular game, he’s taking pieces of the larger franchise and building an original story inside that world.

Cregger explained how the games also influenced the way he shot the movie, saying: "The visual language is taken from the games.

“This movie lives in the third-person, kind of over-the-shoulder shot for most of its runtime, and it jumps to first person a lot. I feel like I have yet to see a movie that really leans into the video game visual vocabulary, the way this movie has."

Instead of simply borrowing monsters, locations, and familiar imagery, Cregger attempted to translate the actual experience of playing a Resident Evil game into filmmaking and I think it worked great!

Of course, some fans still aren’t thrilled that the movie isn’t adapting a specific game or following franchise favorite Leon S. Kennedy.

Cregger has created a new protagonist instead, with Abrams playing Bryan, a medical courier tasked with delivering a package to Raccoon City General Hospital at the end of his shift. Unfortunately for Bryan, his timing absolutely sucks because a zombie and monster outbreak has just erupted.

Considering how much Cregger clearly loves Dark Souls III, it’s hard not to imagine what kind of nightmare he could cook up in that universe someday.

For now, though, he’s got Raccoon City to survive.