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In the space of just a few years, Zach Cregger has gone from making one of the great horror surprises of the decade to becoming someone horror fans will show up for on name alone. Barbarian announced an exhilarating new voice with a near-sadistic understanding of audience expectations. Weapons proved it was anything but a fluke, expanding his canvas without sanding down any of the weirdness that made his first horror film so exciting. And with Resident Evil, Cregger has taken perhaps the biggest risk of his career so far, stepping into a world carrying nearly three decades of expectations and refusing to make the movie anyone assumed he would.
Filmmaking, however, was never supposed to be Cregger’s second act.
Long before The Whitest Kids U’ Know, his years as an actor or even his first feature behind the camera, 2009’s Miss March, this was always what he wanted to do.
“That’s what I wanted to do when I was a little kid,” Cregger says. “I feel like sometimes your six-year-old self is maybe your honest core or something like that. I have no idea what I’m talking about, but when I was a little kid, I wanted to do this. I wanted to make movies.”
“I loved art of all kinds.”
“I was in a band for a while and I did, obviously, live comedy, but this is what I always really wanted to be doing,” he continues. “I think I got diverted along the way at various times, but I feel very, very fortunate to have been able to, a little bit later in life than I was probably expecting, get where I was always hoping to get.”
Where he has ended up would have probably sounded fairly ridiculous to that six-year-old.
After Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger was handed one of the most recognisable horror properties in gaming. But rather than retell the story of Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield or any of the other characters fans have spent decades with, he and co-writer Shay Hatten built an entirely new story inside the universe.
Resident Evil follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier whose routine job sends him toward Raccoon City on exactly the wrong night. What follows is essentially one prolonged nightmare, moving Bryan through a series of increasingly horrifying environments as a man with almost no useful survival skills is asked to do little more than keep moving forward.
It is also exactly the kind of choice that makes Cregger such an interesting filmmaker. Given access to almost three decades of characters, mythology and instantly recognisable iconography, he chose to follow the guy who, in almost any of the games, would probably be running past you somewhere in the background.
That decision was never going to please everyone.
Cregger knew while writing the film that he was making something markedly different from what a large portion of the fanbase expected. At first, that was part of the appeal.
“I think as I was writing it, I was aware that I was doing a very different thing, and I think that was a thrill,” he says. “That thrill lasted only during the script writing.”
Once production was over and the film moved closer to release, the conversation surrounding it began to change.
“I realised that all of that expectation, that cultural expectation, was actually really unpleasant for me,” he admits. “Because it wasn’t about the movie. It was this giant conversation about all these things that really weren’t about the movie itself. And so that was something I don’t think I had appreciated when I started on that ride.”
Months before anybody had seen the finished film, every deviation was already being litigated. Why was there snow? Why did Bryan have a modern phone? Why wasn’t this simply another version of Resident Evil 2?
Cregger’s answer was essentially that he wanted to make the movie he wanted to make.
That gamble has paid off. Resident Evil currently holds a 96% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the first live-action film in the franchise to earn a Certified Fresh rating, while audiences have similarly embraced Cregger’s decision to translate the experience of playing the games rather than simply reproduce their plots.
Even Hideo Kojima, who admitted he initially had little interest in seeing another Resident Evil adaptation, came away from the film reminded of his own experience struggling through the original game.
Cregger still doesn’t particularly feel like saying “I told you so.”
“I don’t know if I feel vindicated,” he says. “I’m gratified. I’m gratified that people responded to it.”
The people who hated the idea before seeing it, he suspects, probably haven’t suddenly come looking for him with an apology.
“That’s the problem with the internet. You never get a sit-down with some anonymous comment section where it’s like, ‘Hey, we had you wrong. Sorry about that.’ That’s never going to happen,” he laughs.
“The only real way, I feel like, to do anything with it is to just not engage with it and just move on with your life.”
More than anything, the experience has made him appreciate what comes next.
“I’m just feeling very grateful that my next movie is an original movie and it can be judged entirely on the merits of the movie and not what people think it should or should not do.”
Cregger’s instinct to enter an enormous fictional universe through the smallest possible door did not begin with Resident Evil.
Years ago, he wrote Henchman, an unproduced screenplay set in Gotham City. Batman and the Joker are both part of the world, but neither is the protagonist. Instead, the film follows a completely ordinary pharmacist who gets dragged into their conflict and reluctantly finds himself working as one of the Joker’s henchmen.
Bryan and that unnamed pharmacist share a surprising amount of DNA.
“I think that’s how my mind just generally works,” Cregger says.
“I like small, intimate stories that are relatively simple.”
Then an image comes to him.
“Just like an ant pushing a grain of sand.”
It is a surprisingly modest image for a filmmaker whose movies keep becoming bigger and more structurally ambitious, but it explains a lot about why they remain so easy to hold onto.
“Something that is just, you can wrap your head around the problem that this character has, and I’m not dealing with these giant tectonic plates of politics and lore and all those things,” he explains.
With Henchman, that means remaining with a “little worker bee” while something enormous happens around him.
“We’ve seen so many Batman stories, but to see it from just a bystander who’s on the edge of everything, I don’t know, I’m so fascinated by that.”
Cregger may keep widening the canvas around his characters, but the problem directly in front of them tends to remain incredibly simple.
Get out of the basement.
Find the missing children.
Make the delivery.
Survive the night.
That simplicity becomes especially important in Resident Evil, because Cregger is trying to translate something film can never literally reproduce: the feeling that the terrible decision being made on screen is somehow yours.
Video games implicate the player in every mistake. A movie cannot. Cregger’s solution was to look less at the mechanics of the games than at their rhythm.
“The games have this really compelling visual language,” he says. “By framing it visually the way I did, we are just so locked in with the character’s experience. I hope that’s the case. That was the goal anyways.”
More importantly, he understood that playing Resident Evil isn’t just shooting zombies and desperately searching for ammunition.
A lot of it is walking.
“The games really celebrate the journey,” Cregger explains. “There’s so much just walking through a room silently in these games. I feel like you’re just sitting with this character, and you’re with them when shit’s popping off, but you’re also with them when they’re just walking.”
There is a sequence in the film where Bryan crosses a snowy field, climbs over a fence and simply keeps going.
Nothing attacks him. There is no enormous set piece waiting halfway across. Cregger still considers it essential.
“I feel like that is just as important as when he’s shooting something in the head,” he says. “That’s my theory anyways.”
It’s an unusually confident choice for a studio horror movie based on a video game, treating a man silently trudging through snow as seriously as the monster waiting for him at the other end. But that patience may be where Cregger gets closest to the games themselves. Resident Evil has always been as much about the dread between encounters as the encounters.
Bryan also never really behaves like the kind of character who ordinarily headlines something this big.
He complains. He panics. He swears at things. He makes bad decisions. Sometimes he responds to a completely horrifying situation in exactly the embarrassingly practical way most normal people probably would.
Austin Abrams is crucial to making any of that work.
The actor had already appeared in Weapons as James, somehow finding an enormous amount of charm in a character who spends much of that film stealing from people and feeding a serious drug addiction. Cregger realised while they were shooting that he had already found Bryan.
“While we were shooting Weapons, I was like, ‘Oh, this is the guy,’” he remembers.
“It was easy. It wasn’t a decision.”
By the time Resident Evil was officially greenlit, casting was essentially a formality.
Cregger remembers speaking with Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman and immediately making one thing clear.
“I was like, ‘Just so you know, thank you for greenlighting the movie, it’s gonna be Austin.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, great.’ So it was from the beginning.”
It’s easy to understand why.
Abrams is especially good at making Bryan feel like a completely ordinary person dropped into a situation he is wildly unprepared for. There’s something very funny about how overwhelmed he is by everything happening around him, but he never plays that panic for laughs. It keeps Bryan grounded even as the film gets bigger and more intense.
Cregger is reluctant to take too much credit.
“A lot of that is also just Austin is a phenomenal actor,” he says. “I can only take so much credit.”
Bryan’s very bad night also arrives while something much more ordinary is already weighing on him.
Early in the film, his girlfriend tells him she may be pregnant. He barely has time to process the possibility of becoming a father before everything around him becomes violently, spectacularly uncontrollable. Suddenly, a character already unsure whether he is prepared for one enormous responsibility is being handed another every few minutes.
For Cregger, that personal conflict was essential.
“You always want to put something from your life into your work to make it mean something to you,” he says. “I feel like if it’s personal, then I can really lock in.”
“I think every adult probably has moments where they are reckoning with, ‘Should I? Shouldn’t I?’ in regards to parenthood,” he adds. “And I understand that.”
If Bryan keeps Resident Evil tethered to something recognisably human, the creatures surrounding him give Cregger permission to go in exactly the opposite direction.
His monsters have always been particularly memorable, but the process behind them is not nearly as straightforward as “make it disgusting.”
For Barbarian, the Mother began with a drawing of Grendel’s mother from an illustrated edition of Beowulf Cregger owned.
“We were working on that look, which was really modelled off of an illustrated book of Beowulf that I had,” he says. “There was a drawing of Grendel’s mother, and so I was really just trying to replicate that drawing.”
The first attempt was relatively restrained.
“I thought it was pretty good. It was very subtle stuff.”
One New Regency executive disagreed.
“She was like, ‘I just don’t think you’ve gone far enough with the face. It doesn’t look that upsetting.’ And I realised that she was exactly right.”
Cregger and the effects team went back to work.
“We really fucked this face up a lot more,” he laughs. “I was glad that we did.”
The funny thing is that the grotesqueness of the Mother ultimately has to serve a very human purpose.
Barbarian begins with Tess (Georgina Campbell) arriving at a Detroit rental home only to discover that it has somehow been double-booked with Keith (Bill Skarsgård), a stranger who initially seems like he could be the danger waiting for her. What she eventually finds beneath the house is something far worse: a sprawling network of tunnels, the Mother (Matthew Patrick Davis), and the horrifying history of Frank (Richard Brake), the man responsible for what happened there. Justin Long later enters the story as AJ, the owner of the house, whose arrival shifts the film in an entirely different direction.
The film spends much of its runtime constantly shifting the object of our fear. First Keith feels dangerous. Then the Mother does. Eventually, we understand that the real horror has always been Frank, and by the end, the creature we were originally conditioned to recoil from becomes one of the story’s greatest victims.
“You see her as a victim. You see the humanity in her. You see that she’s not the title character,” Cregger says. “Frank and arguably Justin Long are the barbarian, right? And the Mother is just a casualty of this.”
That need for humanity kept pulling him toward restraint.
Resident Evil demanded almost the opposite.
“This is a crazy video game thing where you’ve got to kind of swing for the fences,” he says. “Having somebody with tentacles shooting out of their neck hole, I’m not trying to retain their humanity so much.”
In fact, Cregger discovered that he had occasionally swung too far.
“I think I went for it maybe too much,” he admits.
One creature, which he affectionately refers to as “the puker in the elevator shaft,” an acid-vomiting mutant creature that Bryan encounters in Raccoon City General, was built practically with a face so bizarre that Cregger eventually spent part of the film’s visual effects budget making it less extreme.
“We ended up spending some of our VFX money on trying to just kind of alter his face, make it a little less bendy and stuff like that.”
The distinction says a lot about how Cregger thinks about monsters. The Mother needs to survive our fear long enough for us to eventually pity her. The creatures in Resident Evil have a completely different job: make you recoil before your brain has even figured out exactly what you’re looking at.
The same calibration applies to comedy.
It’s impossible to talk about Cregger’s films without talking about how funny they are, but the filmmaker makes an important distinction between humor and jokes. His years in sketch comedy may have given him an instinct for where the laugh is, but increasingly, editing a horror movie means knowing when not to take it.
“There’s a lot in Resident Evil,” he says of material that didn’t survive the edit. “There’s some jokes in there that I thought were really, really funny, but I think they were getting in the way of the scene.”
Zach Cherry lost a bit during the climactic lab attack. Paul Walter Hauser had several lines in the car that Cregger still thinks are great.
“It hurt a lot to take out,” he admits. “But I feel like you have to consider the whole and not the moment. As much as it pains me to lose a laugh, I just don’t miss those jokes. They’re great jokes, but I don’t miss them.”
What Cregger is really interested in is the difference between humor and jokes.
“I’ve seen people be like, ‘What is he talking about? He took all the humor out?’ I’m not saying I took all the humor out. I’m saying I took all the jokes out. There is a difference.”
One example comes after Bryan accidentally hits a woman with his car. He assumes she is injured, completely unaware that she has already turned, but as her behavior becomes increasingly strange, he casually asks a police officer, “Can she ride with you?”
“That’s humorous, but it’s not a joke, because that is just what any of us would probably do in that moment,” Cregger explains. “I think we’re laughing because we totally believe that he would ask that question.”
“So the humor is in, but the jokes I really tried to pull out.”
That difference between humor and jokes is something Cregger is very conscious of when he edits.
Weapons is another good example of how far he can push tone without losing the audience, moving from missing children to drug addicts to Aunt Gladys and somehow making all of it belong in the same movie.
And he isn’t done with Gladys yet.
Amy Madigan’s instantly iconic character is getting a film of her own, currently titled Gladys and dated for September 2028. The project has evolved from material Cregger initially considered for Weapons, and he confirms that Zach Shields is now writing the screenplay from a story the two developed together.
“We are calibrating it and kind of fine-tuning it now. We’ll see how it goes. You know how this town is. Nothing’s a go until it’s a go, but it’s very promising.”
There is at least one part he considers non-negotiable.
Asked whether Madigan would return, Cregger doesn’t hesitate.
“Of course. There’s no world where it can’t be Amy.”
Before that happens, though, Cregger is turning his attention somewhere entirely new.
His next film, The Flood, is an original science-fiction project starring Jennifer Lawrence, with Amblin Entertainment among the companies backing it and a theatrical release currently set for August 11, 2028. Plot details remain largely under wraps.
Lawrence was not exactly difficult for him to imagine in the role.
“She is maybe one of my favourite actors alive,” Cregger begins.
Then he immediately corrects himself.
“I mean, not maybe. She is. I am just completely amazed by her.”
Getting the script to her was considerably less assured.
Lawrence was working, and it took Cregger some time to finally secure a short FaceTime conversation.
“I don’t even think she’d realised that I was trying to get a meeting with her because I wanted to offer her this movie,” he recalls. “I felt like I had a limited window to shoot my shot.”
What followed was not the cool, perfectly measured filmmaker pitch one might imagine.
“I did this kind of frantic pitch on a Zoom. I was like, ‘Here’s what the movie is.’ And then luckily, I think she was intrigued and read the script.”
“It’s not the sexiest story in the world, but that’s what happened.”
Cregger has previously called The Flood the screenplay he is most proud of, but his description of it now is a little more revealing.
“I think it’s my most human story,” he says. “It’s my weirdest movie. It is scary, I think, but it’s also structurally bizarre, but not in the way that Weapons and Barbarian are, in a new way that, to me, I’m the most excited about.”
He also has absolutely no idea how he is going to pull some of it off.
“There’s a lot of technical challenges in it that I have no idea how I’m going to pull off, but I’m excited to try,” he says. “And the ending is like my favourite thing.”
That uncertainty appears to be exactly what Cregger is looking for.
“You always want to be pushing yourself. You never want to feel like you’re going to make something that you are certain you’re going to nail.”
“So I am nervous about it,” he continues. “But I think that is just a sign that I’m on the right track. The fact that I’m kind of intimidated by it, I think, is a healthy thing.”
His attitude heading into Resident Evil had been very different.
“I was thinking when I was making Resident Evil, I wasn’t really pushing myself,” he says. “I was just kind of like, I can shoot these crazy scenes, and I can make it kind of funny and do this.”
His expectation?
“This will just be like a fun kind of spa day for me as a filmmaker.”
It was not.
“So who knows what I’m in store for on this one, where I feel already like this is going to be the hardest movie ever,” he says. “But I think it might be the one I’m the most proud of when all is said and done. We’ll see.”
Whatever comes after The Flood is considerably less certain. Cregger jokes earlier in our conversation that he doesn’t even know whether he’ll make another movie or “do something else” with his life. For now, though, he seems happy to still be inside horror at a moment when the genre feels particularly open to people doing things nobody quite expects.
He points to Kane Parsons’ Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession, two very different 2026 horror films from young filmmakers who built their audiences online before making the jump to bigger features. Parsons was just 20 when Backrooms arrived in theaters, while Barker’s Obsession followed his breakout micro-budget work online. Both films became significant genre successes this year.
Cregger has already watched Obsession three times.
“Every time I watch it, I like it even more,” he says.
He came to Backrooms later.
“I loved it so much, I started it again the next day,” Cregger says. “I did another lap on it because I was just pretty blown away by it.”
Not that long ago, Cregger himself was the person arriving seemingly out of nowhere with Barbarian, asking audiences to walk into a movie without knowing where it was going and trusting that the floor might disappear beneath them at any moment. Now he is watching another generation discover how much freedom horror can still offer.
“What I love so much about horror is that it feels like such a fertile genre where it’s like anything,” he says. “I could see anything when I go into a movie.”
“If I sit down at Obsession and I don’t know anything about it, I’m going to have my mind blown.”
That possibility, more than any particular monster or subgenre, seems to be what keeps him excited.
“I’m thrilled by that. I think horror is evergreen, and it’s fun. I’m just excited to be part of it, and I hope I get to keep being a part of it for a while.”
For someone whose career has changed so dramatically over the last few years, it feels fitting that some of Cregger’s clearest creative memories still come from simply sitting in a theater and seeing an image he couldn’t get out of his head.
I Asked which single shot from any film he would choose to embody himself, he initially lands on Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, specifically a slow push toward the bark of a tree.
Then another image interrupts him.
“There’s two. God damn it.”
The one he eventually chooses comes from David Fincher’s Se7en.
“The shot that probably altered me the most as a young person was the shot in Seven where Kevin Spacey puts the gun to Brad Pitt’s head, and the rain is dropping down on it, and it’s this wide-angle lens and this massive gun in the frame,” he remembers.
“I remember little, whatever, teenage Zach sitting in the theater seeing that and just being convinced that I’d never seen anything that cool in my whole life.”
More than 30 years later, he hasn’t changed his mind.
“I agree with little teenage Zach that there has never been a shot cooler than that since.”
Why that image?
“The power and the mystery of it,” Cregger says. “You don’t see his face. It’s obscured, and the rain on the gun. It’s tactile. The gun is so big in the frame it looks like it’s aiming at you, and it’s gray, and the depth of field is really narrow.”
He pauses, briefly sounding less like the filmmaker behind three of the biggest horror movies of the last few years and more like the teenager who couldn’t believe what he was looking at.
“It all works so well, and it’s thrilling. It is a perfect shot.”
