The first clip from Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reboot has been released online, giving us an intense, extended look at a key sequence involving the walking falling dead.
The red band clip begins with Austin Abrams' hapless protagonist, Bryan, emerging from a sewer and making his way down a snow-covered street. He's startled by a zombie hurling itself from a roof, and races to avoid an entire apartment block of undead monsters splattering all over the road.
“It feels like one gigantic sequence," Cregger said of his take on the survival horror video games during a recent interview with Empire. "Things pop off about five minutes in and it basically stays like that until the end. What I love about the games is that you move from set-piece to set-piece. Every location has a unique challenge ... I’m borrowing from the games directly in that rhythm, where you’re just running through a gauntlet"
“The concept here is that we’re following an idiot,” he went on. “Not that he’s stupid, but he’s not your typical game character, with no combat skills whatsoever and completely inept at survival. Bryan is very much an everyman who happens to be burdened with this kind of sacred mission that’s going to take him into the heart of everything. It’s kind of like Frodo going into Mordor.”
From the mind of visionary filmmaker Zach Cregger (Weapons, Barbarian) comes a thrilling — and terrifying — reinvention of the Resident Evil franchise. In an all-new story, Resident Evil follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in an action-packed, non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
The cast also includes Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser. Cregger directs from a screenplay he wrote with Shay Hatten, and producers include Robert Kulzer, Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Carter Swan, and Asad Qizilbash. The executive producers are Oliver Berben, Victor Hadida, Richard Wright, and Robert Bernacci.
Resident Evil is set to be released in theaters on September 18.