The Walking Dead star Chandler Riggs is a big fan of Resident Evil. So much so, that Riggs has taken a cue from other Resident Evil fan films to create his own. In this case, Riggs has adapted the iconic garage fight from Resident Evil 7 into a 20-minute short entitled BIOHAZARD, which is live now!
Per iHorror, Riggs, who starred in, wrote and directed BIOHAZARD, enlisted the help of fellow TWD alumni Jason Douglas for the short. While Riggs plays RE7 protagonist Ethan Winters, Douglas plays Jack Baker, patriarch of the infected family Ethan stumbles upon. If that wasn’t enough of a collab, KNB EFX co-founder Greg Nicotero (who also did the show’s makeup effects) supplied the short’s special effects. Mary Rachel Quinn, Eugenie Bondurant, Johnathan O’Neil and Sam Coyles also star in the short.
In an interview with IGN, Riggs mentions that he simply wanted to bring this moment to life on-screen. And of course, given the timing with Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil film, the interview inevitably turned to that.
“We were in pre-production [on the short] when the article came out that Zack Cregger was going to do his [movie],” explains Riggs. “I was like, ‘Oh man, all right, we got to get ours out first.’ We were trying to beat the clock and get it out about a month ago, but parts just didn’t align that way.”
Riggs explains that one of the reasons he made this short was the desire to “see a good, true-to-the-game live-action adaptation of Resident Evil.”
According to Riggs, playing Ethan was “absolutely an intimidating thing,” particularly due to the fact that unlike the game, the short is shot from a third person point of view, which similar to Cregger’s film, might not sit well with certain purists.
“We’re trying to do so much else super faithful and true to the game, but this [third person perspective] is a huge aspect that we are breaking from it,” explains Riggs. “But there isn’t really another good way to tell [the story] in a live-action format. I was going back and forth like ‘Okay, could we do first person the whole time? Could we avoid getting his face in or anything?’ But the more we went back and forth on it, the more I was like, ‘I mean, if we are going to do this and are going to appeal to a wider audience — more than just the people who played the games — then we’re going to have to break those rules. It was very intimidating. Hopefully people are okay with it.”
