As a former sketch comedy guy who’s now found a second—and pretty inarguably more successful—life as a horror director, there’s a certain amount of comedy that’s endemic to the work of Zach Cregger. (Barbarian has basically everything to do with Justin Long, for instance, while you could argue that the extremely cathartic climax of Weapons is the punchline to what’s essentially been an entire movie’s worth of setup.) But fans expecting Cregger’s upcoming video game adaptation Resident Evil to be especially gut-busting (in a non-“zombie stomachs exploding” sense) should recalibrate those expectations: The writer-director says test audiences convinced him to cut a large portion of the movie’s jokes.
“I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny,” Cregger told THR this week, revealing that, after putting the film through tests, he decided to see if the audiences who were laughing too much had a point. “So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible. I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more.” Noting that “there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss,” Cregger opined that “A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cregger expressed his sympathy for fans of the Resident Evil game franchise who are angry the movie doesn’t feature direct adaptations of any of its characters—”If that is what you love about these games, then you’re going to feel a certain way about it. ‘Here comes yet another Hollywood movie, and they’re once again not doing Leon and all the characters I was hoping they were going to do'”—and talked about his decision to adopt at least some of the visual language of the games for his film: “I tend to think that the third-person perspective that the games utilize is wildly effective, and so that ended up being the movie’s predominant visual language. The movie is stronger for it. But it’s only inspired by the games; there wasn’t any sort of rule. So I jumped from third person to first person to objective all the time, and it’s a blend. It’s a moment-by-moment thing.”
Resident Evil arrives in theaters on September 18.
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