Editorials
When Horror Went Online in the Underrated ‘Resident Evil Outbreak’
I adore the Resident Evil franchise to death, but the series is so obsessed with its own convoluted mythology that piecing together a coherent backstory can be a challenging Survival-Horror puzzle in its own right. The 7th entry and the recent remakes were all fantastic games, but the best part of these experiences was not having to keep a franchise encyclopedia on hand at all times in order to understand what was going on (although the increased emphasis on horror and non-steroid-abusing protagonists was also a plus). So now that Capcom is on a roll again, I’d like discuss one of their most underappreciated projects and make a case for why this is the perfect time to bring it back. Of course, I’m referring to the underrated spin-off: Resident Evil Outbreak.
For those who never played it, Resident Evil Outbreak was an online cooperative multiplayer take on the RE Formula. Originally released in late 2003 for the PlayStation 2, this odd little side story revisits the iconic Raccoon City incident from the point of view of ordinary citizens. When a small group of unfortunate souls becomes trapped inside a bar, they must work together and face several horrific scenarios in order to survive the undead onslaught, courtesy of the Umbrella Corporation.
While the game still follows a basic Survival-Horror premise, with this rag-tag gang having to solve convoluted puzzles and manage resources as they slay undead bio-weapons, the focus on cooperation and down-to-earth characters make this an entirely different experience. You won’t find any members of S.T.A.R.S. here, as the character selection ranges from security guards to journalists and even plumbers, with the player really feeling that these are just ordinary people forced to deal with extraordinary circumstances.
The levels themselves are also incredibly immersive, with (mostly) mundane locations making this feel more like a zombie apocalypse simulator akin to Left 4 Dead rather than a contemporary Resident Evil title with booby-trapped mansions and foreign villages. The settings range from universities to hospitals and hotels, making Outbreak much more in line with the franchise’s original George Romero inspirations instead of the action-movie set-pieces of later titles.
Taking the train is never easy.
With this slightly more realistic approach, the game as a whole hits a lot closer to home and manages to be scary even in the company of other players. The creature designs were also great, though they were mostly updated models borrowed from other games in the series. This would actually be improved with the release of the game’s expansion in late 2004, Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2, which added new and improved content to the game.
While the expansion was mostly a showcase of levels that were supposedly cut from the original game, it also worked as a standalone title in its own right, boasting improved load times and tweaked gameplay, with players now able to move and shoot at the same time (a first for the franchise). File #2 also contains some of my favorite moments in any Resident Evil game, with even more familiar locations turned into apocalyptic nightmares. The Wild Things scenario was particularly fun, as it traps the characters in an infected Zoo, forcing players to fight undead wildlife as they attempt to escape.
The entire experience here was really ahead of its time, implementing randomly generated content and a context-sensitive “ad-lib” system so that players could communicate without immersion-breaking voice-chat. There was also a “Virus Gauge” that could infect players if they dilly-dallied for too long, making sure that folks didn’t waste each other’s time during matches. While a lot of these ideas seem like no-brainers for an online title nowadays, remember that this was all designed for the PlayStation 2 and released at a time when dial-up internet was still common.
Unfortunately, these ambitions also had a negative impact on the game, with most players not having a decent enough connection to play online, making server options quite limited. While the lack of voice-chat did indeed make the game scarier, the ad-lib system wasn’t much help during the puzzle segments and was inexplicably removed from western releases of the game. The servers were also gutted after only 4 years, though it’s still possible to play the entirety of the campaign offline (and there are working fan servers out there).
I’d run too!
Even ignoring these online issues, the game wasn’t perfect by any means. Several of the puzzles were just downright stupid, with translation errors making them even harder to solve. There was even a hint of that convoluted RE history bogging down a few sections of what should have been a standalone spin-off. However, most of these flaws are forgivable when you consider the sheer amount of innovation and creativity behind other parts of the game.
It’s funny to think that if Outbreak had been released only a few years later during the online console gaming boom, it could have been one of the franchise’s biggest success stories and we might still be seeing new Files released to this very day. The series played around with a lot of Co-Op elements later on, with the recent RE3 remake even being bundled with Resident Evil Resistance, an asymmetrical multiplayer experience that also takes place during the original Raccoon City incident, but none of these experiments were as faithful to the original games as Outbreak.
Nevertheless, with Capcom clearly feeling nostalgic for Resident Evil history, this is one experiment worth reviving for modern gamers. It wouldn’t take much to re-release an HD version of the title with proper online support, but I think I might personally prefer a complete re-imagining of this unique brand of Survival-Horror. With online horror gaming on the rise after the success of titles like Dead by Daylight, an online experience that requires players to work together to survive classic Survival-Horror scenarios would be incredible.
With Resident Evil Village on the horizon (and a possible remake of RE4 to boot), it’s clear that this series refuses to die, so there will be plenty of opportunities for another Outbreak-styled spin-off in the future. For now, however, I’m happy to reminisce about that time I got together with a few friends over a shaky internet connection and shot a zombie elephant in the face while playing as a badass waitress.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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