I have never smelled anything like the set of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. When I visited the massive Prague sound stage in December, the air was filled with the latex scents of enormous, grisly props combined with the sharp odor of burning metal as welders built the world of Raccoon City. A sweet aroma rose up from the fake blood that was laid on the floor so thick it stuck to the bottom of my boots.
Last year, Polygon was part of a press trip that provided a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Resident Evil. I followed in the footsteps of hapless medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams), exploring the horrors the t-virus wrought across a series of sets. Now that the movie has finally arrived, I can reveal everything I learned about its creation, with a focus on three of the film’s scariest scenes.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Resident Evil
The sewer
As he tries to make his way to Raccoon City on foot, Bryan escapes into a sewer tunnel to avoid a tentacled monster. He’s drawn to a noise that sounds a bit like a prolonged belch, which turns out to be coming from a huge, naked, pale man sitting in his path. Bryan cautiously approaches, asking if the man is OK, before watching as his gut bursts and unleashes a swarm of bloody rats.
Like Bryan, our group navigated the sewer set by the light of our cellphones so we could get the full effect of rounding a blind corner and seeing the massive figure lurking there. The set was meticulously detailed and strewn with detritus, with fiberglass used to create the look of walking through liquid. Pneumatic elements were used to pump air bladders in the stomach of the creature dubbed the “fat man” to create the wheezing and writhing of the rats in his gut before they spill out, exposing his organs. Each rodent was an individual prop, and up close the creatures look like oversized, diseased naked mole rats.
While many props were 3D printed, the big man himself was hand-sculpted to add details like overgrown toe nails. He was the biggest singular practical effects piece Legacy Effects created for the film.
“Part of my job is to determine what technique is going to work well for what purpose,” Legacy Effects co-founder Shane Mahan said. “The sculpture just seemed like it needed to be hand-formed to get the textures right. It had an organic feeling.”
The elevator
After finally arriving at his destination, Bryan is told it’s not safe to take the elevator up to Umbrella Corporation’s lab on the 24th floor of Raccoon City General Hospital. So he starts walking up the emergency stairs, which were built specifically for the film using five tons of concrete, but Bryan quickly gets winded and tries his luck with the elevator.
According to production designer Tom Hammock, building a working five-story elevator for that sequence was the biggest challenge of the whole movie, requiring sourcing tons of steel on the open market and getting special safety certifications. Each panel could be pulled out to become camera platforms. The crew also built a special rig, creating a vertical version of the cable-suspended camera systems used to film major sporting events so it could track Abrams as the elevator moved.
“The first day of shooting, Zach was like, ‘Why didn’t we just do it in a blue box?’” Hammock said. “But then he got into it, and it worked, and he got some really amazing stuff.”
Most of the elevator is destroyed by an acid-barfing monster the film’s special effects team called “the Puker.” An actor wore a rig over his stomach with tubes that spewed out methyl cellulose, the same slimy blend of water and powdered paper pulp used to represent the xenomorphs’ acidic saliva in Alien. Each take involved spraying 16 gallons of the stuff.
When I was on set, the VFX team gleefully showed off a cellphone video of the Puker in action.
“We get paid for this,” Mahan said. “We are very lucky.”
Enormous tubs were positioned under the elevator shaft to try to catch as much of the spray as possible, but that didn’t really work. The fake puke got everywhere and had to be cleaned up overnight so the shot could be reset in the morning.
Hammock used the same technique as Fede Álvarez’s 2024 film Alien: Romulus to replace pieces of the elevator with different sculptures as it dissolves, with the visual effects team just adding the sizzling edges. The cables in camera are constantly moving, adding extra tension to the action sequence where Bryan has to deal with both the Puker and a rampaging ball of fused limbs and tentacles that’s been chasing him for most of the movie.
The maternity ward
At the start of Resident Evil, Bryan gets into a fight with his pregnant girlfriend because he’s uncertain if he wants a kid. That anxiety takes an extremely visceral form in his visit to a maternity ward, where the t-virus has contaminated all the babies and staff.
For director Zach Cregger, this scene was also a chance to bring new horrors to the Resident Evil franchise.
“There’s a very thin metaphor in this movie and it’ll be immediately obvious to everyone who sees it, but the zombie babies are kind of the cherry on top,” Cregger said. “I wanted to make sure I was coming up with new enemies, new creatures, new zombies that could be in the games.”
The Legacy Effects team welcomed us to their offices on set by showing off the long-limbed blinking, three-eyed animatronic baby that crawls out of a bassinet as Bryan watches in horror. Visual effects were used to create the membrane on top of the little monster, and while Mahan demonstrated the unsettling way it moved and how its eyes could each be opened individually, you barely see it in the movie before chaos breaks out in the room.
“It’s about 45 seconds of screen time but that’s OK,” Mahan said. “It’s going to be great.”
Legacy Effects also created numerous other squirming, mutant babies for the scene, employing a wide variety of designs including bulging skulls and feet that have been replaced by tentacles. Each mutant baby was controlled by puppeteers hiding behind the walls. Little details add to the horror, like a blood-spattered white board representing the infants’ feeding schedule.
The floor was coated with 500 gallons of fake blood – with more added after every take to cover up footsteps. Red embryo-like pods surround the room, connected to the walls with tentacle-like veins. It took 15 people two weeks to hand cut and glue the components. Extras hidden in trap doors stuck their hands and feet out of the fiberglass eggs. Stunt performers trained to hold their breath were positioned against the membranes along with 50 gallons of red slime. Then, at a key moment, they burst out in a twisted version of the birthing process to chase Bryan.
Byran rushes out of the maternity ward onto the shattered skybridge, but that scene was actually shot on an entirely different sound stage where Cregger and his crew recreated the maternity ward doors.
The props department built the skybridge and then wrecked it to make the damage look realistic. The entire thing was just a couple inches wide and lined with rubber rebar. Abrams did the stunt work himself for the scene, which was filmed using a mix of cranes and cameras set on tracks.
Cregger’s commitment to practical effects made Resident Evil extremely tricky to produce but also resulted in a phenomenal movie where the horror feels very real. Cregger and Hammock built models and used action figures to walk the Sony execs through scenes like the maternity ward to get approval for their wildest ideas.
“They were actually really, really supportive,” Hammock said. “They were like, ‘Oh, we think you could actually pull it off. Off you go. We’ll see you at the finish line.’ And here we are.”
Resident Evil is in theaters now.
Sony Pictures covered the cost of travel and lodging for this trip.