As Halloween is fast approaching, the Fanbase Press staff and contributors decided that there was no better way to celebrate this horrifically haunting holiday than by sharing our favorite scary stories! Be they movies, TV shows, video games, novels, or any other form of entertainment, members of the Fanbase Press crew will be sharing their “scariest” stories each day leading up to Halloween. We hope that you will enjoy this sneak peek into the terrors that frighten Fanbase Press!
“You’re all going to die down here.”
Which is more or less what happens in the 2002 action/horror feature film, Resident Evil, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, James Purefoy, Colin Salmon, and Martin Crewes (based on the computer game Resident Evil/Biohazard, developed by Capcom).
Out of all the standard horror tropes – the vampires, the mummies, the werewolves (although they run a close second) – it’s the zombies that scare me the most. Not only does Resident Evil have a bunch of those, it has a number of other items on my personal scare list that puts it way up there on my roster of all-time favorites. Trapped underground, elevators, body horror, confined spaces, hopeless attempts at trying to stay alive, overwhelming ravenous hunger, the uncanny valley, rogue A.I., viruses, greed, horrible corporations . . . it’s all in there, so let’s get started.
We’ll get this over with first – the elevator. I always take the stairs if at all possible. Honestly, I do. Confined spaces, the fear of being trapped with a crush of other people if something goes wrong, and, boy, does it go wrong here, after someone steals and lets loose the T-virus from the lab, contaminating the entire facility (Umbrella Corporation’s Hive), forcing the resident artificial intelligence (The Red Queen) to shut everything down with extreme prejudice. Halon gas and drowning seems to take care of the remaining workforce, and these scenes set the tone for the rest of the film.
A security duo and a team of commandos break into the Hive with the intent of pulling the plug on the facility’s Red Queen supercomputer, except our computer, being super, has a brace of protective skills and isn’t about to go down without a fight. Trapping them would have done it, but on this occasion, the A.I. has decided on a little slicing and dicing, and we’re beginning to wonder if perhaps we shouldn’t be placing too much super into some of these computers.
Meanwhile, some of the others are waiting in what the schematic calls “the dining room,” except there’s no food, no tables and chairs, just row upon row of sealed chambers containing . . . what exactly? We’ve been told Umbrella Corp is engaging in illegal genetic and viral research, so we can probably take a good guess.
Finally, the remaining team manages shut down the Red Queen, which has the unfortunate effect of releasing all the locks and opening all the doors. That poor lady we saw dead and floating in the flooded laboratory while we were on our way to the computer hub? If that wasn’t creepy enough, girl’s about to get a whole lot creepier.
What follows is a desperate chase through the Hive, searching for a way out while being chased by an overwhelming crowd of ravenous zombies. Stirring in a little variety, and because this is a research lab and there’s bound to be cages of fluffy little animals, in Resident Evil we have zombie Dobermans, enabling us to revisit a jacked-up version of that deep-seated primal fear of being chased through the forest by a pack of wolves.
By now, I think we’ve figured out that most of us wouldn’t get out of a situation like this. We’re hit with everything, up to and including human treachery, and even if we make it to the train, one of those critters from the “dining room” is waiting with a twelve-foot tongue and a nasty disposition.
But perhaps the worst thing of all, and this goes back to why I consider zombies particularly disturbing, it’s like Chad, the computer guy says, “Those people used to work here!” And if we have any chance at all in getting out of this, we have to start dehumanizing.
It’s easy to get caught up in the gun battles and the mad rush to escape, but once in a while the film takes a moment to examine the dilemma of survival at the expense of human compassion and companionship. For most of us, there’s a terrible cost in flicking that switch, not to mention the considerable bill that comes due after dehumanizing our fellows. Invariably, it’s settled with a dagger to the heart and a stain on the soul, and unfortunately we see it out there in the real world every day. Did Alice feel that dagger when she was faced with killing Rain? I’m betting she did, and then some.
