In Resident Evil, Zach Kreger literally dropped human-sized bags of blood Six Stories

In Zach Kreger’s Resident Evilwhich is 90 minutes long, there is a moment where the protagonist Brian (Austin Abrams) is walking down the street. Zombies then start jumping from buildings down to him. It’s practically raining zombies. And you might be thinking, how did they do that? Well, he actually made it rain zombies.

During Collider’s Directors to Direct panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2026, Kreger talked about the most difficult scene he’s ever done in his career. And he settled on the one from the upcoming one Resident Evil.

« (Austin) runs and they just detonate all around him and this really long gauntlet of jumping cars and exploding bodies, » Creger said. « And I didn’t want to do it with VFX. I’m not afraid to use them, but I wanted to do as many practical detonations as possible because that would make it look tangible and real. »

« So what we did is we had to set up all these frames and string up all these 150-pound human sacks that were loaded with liquid blood and coat the street with snow and get the weather right, » he continued. « All these things had to happen together. Austin had to run at a constant speed. We had to have a camera truck following him very close. If he had tripped, they would have run him over and killed him. And we had to time the drop of these bodies that are six stories up—it’s a long fall—and these 150-pound things land next to him and explode. »

« So we have to make sure, hopefully, they don’t cover the camera, which they did in a lot of the shots, » Creger said. « I’m hoping they don’t kill my star, which of them fell too early, and it’s in the movie, it goes an inch from his head. If it was an inch to the right, he definitely would have died. But I think it paid off. It’s great. I’d do it 20 more times if I had to. We ended up adding some of the explosions with a little bit of VFX, but to make it practical, take that real physics and see how it all really works, I did it a lot, so much better. So it was dangerous, it took days and it took a lot of planning, but I think I’m really proud of it.

Later in the panel, Kreger showed a less difficult but equally horrifying scene of Abrams’ character finding an overturned police car and trying to help the officer inside, only to be attacked by a female zombie. He has to grab the cop’s gun as the woman chases him around the car, disappears, reappears and he shoots her.

Creger revealed to the panel that he saw nothing else Resident Evil movies, but what he was pretty sure they didn’t do was really tap into the survival horror aspect that he loves from games.

« I like that slow, creeping dread, » he said. « I like the idea of a person walking on their feet from point A to point B, and they have to get into a gauntlet and go deeper and deeper into hell. I like the idea that you start with a pistol and you have to keep track of how many bullets you have, and then you go to a rifle and you get a machine gun and the world is just (hell) bent on destroying you and you feel like you don’t have enough resources to you get through it, but you have to figure out how to do it. »

« I just feel like there’s a movie out there that I haven’t seen yet, and I’ve been wanting to do it so badly, » he continued. « What I didn’t do is I didn’t take a story from the games and turn it into a movie, because I’m not going to do better than the games. I’m not going to tell Leon’s story better than the game tells my story. And I feel like it would be kind of a wasted effort for me to try and repeat something that’s already been done so excellently. So for me, it’s a love letter to these games to make a story that feels like the experience I get when playing the games.’

Resident Evil opens September 18.

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