Editorials
5 Quietly Awesome Moments in ‘Resident Evil’
When I think back on the countless hours I’ve invested into the Resident Evil series, it’s mostly a blur of strangely shaped keys, frantic boss fights, and chainsaws whirring toward me, all backed by a mash-up of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Drowning Pool’s Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. It’s intense and wonderful, like I’m driving a bulldozer through a haunted house — not an active one, I’m not a monster — but it’s not what first drew me to these games so many years ago.
This series can be called a very many different things, and subtle is rarely among them anymore. It’s too bad, because Capcom was kind of great at the Art of the Slow Burn early on. While we’re waiting to see which direction it’s headed next, let’s look back at a few of the moments that were memorable for their restraint.
The Hall of Lickers – Resident Evil 5
I had to start with this, if only because it’s five minutes of intense tiptoeing in a game that had me running, gunning, rolling, and yelling at Sheva for being the worst. This is a game that opens with the village fight from Resident Evil 4, only larger and considerably louder, and ends with a showdown set inside of a volcano. That’s about as subtle as punching a boulder the size of a VW Beetle up a hill just so you can ride it down the other side while firing two rocket launchers at a target that’s already 10-15 seconds away from dying like the Terminator.
That’s a jarring scenario, no? About 80% of that actually happened, the rest can be found in my upcoming exposé, “Seeing Redfield: Chris is Totally Using Steroids, You Guys”.
I even liked Resident Evil 5. I think it’s a fun, underrated co-op game that’s often labelled “bad” for either failing to build on its predecessor’s legacy in a meaningful way, or for not promptly undoing that legacy, depending on who you ask. It’s silly, sure, but it also featured one of my all-time favorite moments in the history of the series: the Hall of Lickers.
Near the beginning of chapter 5, Chris and Sheva are tasked with fighting their way through a legion of lickers so they can get to a corridor filled with more lickers. There are only a few at first, wandering about like the big, dumb blind dogs that they are. If you’re quiet, you can walk through the corridor and nary a stray tongue will hassle you. It’s a freaky, albeit woefully brief, moment that can (and will, probably) go from being quietly awesome to a cacophonous disaster when Sheva decides to run like a dickhead toward three goddamn handgun bullets.
You don’t even need those bullets, Sheva. You know what? I’m glad Capcom left you in Africa.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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