Resident Evil, the latest live-action adaptation of the popular video game series, has quickly become one of Netflix’s most-watched properties in recent weeks. Despite the amount of people tuning in, though, the show has found itself at the bitter mercy of unimpressed fans, particularly for its deviations from the video games and tonal inconsistencies.
Indeed, at first glance, the show is based on Resident Evil in spirit only, sporting the Umbrella Corporation’s presence, a planet full of zombie-like monsters for our protagonists to go up against, and… that’s about it. If you’re a fan of the games, it would be unwise to expect much in the way of an adaptation this time around.
It may come as a shock, then, to learn that showrunner Andrew Dabb himself is a devoted fan of the video game series. In an interview with Collider, Dabb revealed that his love for the games stems from the position they hold in the horror genre, and how they managed to carve out what some might call a necessary branch within it.
“I’m just a huge fan of Resident Evil. You know what I mean? And the games and the movies. The games were defining in a way, for me, just for the horror genre period. In terms of like, they really form what I think horror is and what really works, and you could see that in Supernatural at different points. And then the movies, I think, are a bit underrated, because they were one of the first movies that really took multiple genres and kind of shuffled them together, whether it’s sci-fi and horror and action and everything else.”
He would go on to touch on the potential of the Resident Evil canon and the unexamined corners of it, which Dabb began to touch on with his series.
“Resident Evil itself has a lot of elements that you can do that with, with the monsters and some of the backstory and the corporate maneuverings and the crazy conspiracies. Then they kind of allowed us — they being Netflix and Capcom — to build on that as well. So the games are the backstory, but we now are branching off into our own little world.”
We suppose it’s only natural that a die-hard fan of the Resident Evil franchise would be best suited to take its world in brand new directions, so perhaps this revelation isn’t as surprising as it seems.
Resident Evil is currently streaming on Netflix.