By Phil Hornshaw on Jan 19, 2019 09:30 pm
A Long History Of Evil
Resident Evil's story seems simple enough at first blush: Evil corporation develops virus that turns people into monsters; virus escapes. But years of reworks, prequels, and retcons have changed the details pretty significantly. Yes, much of Resident Evil is still about an evil corporation and its zombie virus, but it's also littered with twisted characters, horrifying creatures, and complex conspiracies. With the release of the Resident Evil 2 remake imminent, there's a lot of story to revisit--both from the remake of Resident Evil and from Resident Evil Zero, the GameCube prequel that added a whole lot of Umbrella-centric details to the lore. We fully expect the new Resident Evil 2 to make some changes that bring the original story more in line with all the material that has come after it, as well, and it might even provide some new details and insights on the characters and Umbrella's evil plans. Here's everything that happened leading up to the Resident Evil 2 remake, and everything you need to know to navigate the halls of its maze-like story.
The Founding of Umbrella Pharmaceuticals
The evil Umbrella Corporation got its start when three rich guys--Oswell Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus--decided to start a company. It all began with Spencer, who in his early life stumbled on a description of an African flower called Stairway of the Sun that supposedly had powerful properties. Spencer, along with his university friend Marcus, eventually set out to try to find the Stairway of the Sun flower in 1966. They discovered it, and the rumors were true: the plant contained an RNA virus that could be used to genetically alter other organisms. Together with their buddy Ashford, Spencer and Marcus started Umbrella to give them cover to research the virus, which they dubbed Progenitor. The three men thought they could use Progenitor to turn humanity into a race of super men to remake the world into one they would rule. They founded Umbrella Pharmaceuticals to fund their research toward that goal. The three founders weren't always in lockstep, however, and each started pursuing his own agenda.
Project Wesker And The T-Virus
Spencer wanted to use the Progenitor virus to usher in a new era of humanity through eugenics, with himself as its ruler. To that end, he created Project Wesker, a research program to create new superhumans using the virus. The project kidnapped hundreds of children, with the plan of guiding their upbringing and brainwashing them to be loyal to Spencer. They were also eventually infected with a strain of Progenitor in order to speed their evolution. Many of the Wesker children died from the exposure, but a few survived. One of these children was Albert Wesker--more on him later. The Umbrella founders started using Progenitor to create biological weapons they could sell to the U.S. military, while continuing to fund their even more evil eugenics endeavors. They also grew to distrust each other, often hiding their Progenitor research from one another. Ashford built a lab in Antarctica, but he was the weakest of the virologists, and he worried the other two founders would push him out of the company and the new world order they were creating. He was right: Spencer had Ashford assassinated in 1968. Ashford's son Alexander, a geneticist, continued his work for years, away from the rest of Umbrella. Umbrella built underground labs in the Arklay Mountains outside of Raccoon City, a town in the Midwestern U.S. Marcus ran one, which also included an Umbrella training facility he was supposed to run. Spencer commissioned a mansion to be built atop the second underground lab, one that was full of esoteric locks, puzzles, and maze-like corridors to confuse (and maybe kill) anyone not authorized to be inside. When the mansion was completed, Spencer had the architect and his family killed in order to hide its secrets. The architect's daughter, Lisa Trevor, was kept alive as a human test subject, and Umbrella experimented on her for decades. Marcus eventually made a breakthrough in turning Progenitor into a weapon. He created the T-Virus, a version of Progenitor that wouldn't just kill anyone infected with it, but would mutate them into hideous creatures and turn them murderous. That made the T-Virus both effective as a weapon to eliminate a population, and capable of easily spreading. The trouble was, in any given population, about 10 percent of people were naturally immune to the T-Virus. In order to make sure nobody could escape a T-Virus deployment, researchers at the mansion facility started creating B.O.W.s, or Bio-Organic Weapons, which were mutated creatures that could be used to hunt down and eliminate survivors and other targets.
Spencer's Betrayal
Over time, the remaining two founders of Umbrella started to become more and more suspicious of each other. At the same time, Albert Wesker, who had studied to become a virologist, and Dr. William Birkin rose in the ranks of the company at Marcus's training facility, and started working closely with Marcus. As time went on, Marcus started experimenting with using the T-Virus to mutate and enhance leeches, and using his own staff as research subjects. He became a greater and greater liability, and eventually, Spencer decided to have him killed, too. Spencer ordered Umbrella soldiers to assassinate Marcus, with Wesker and Birkin aiding the betrayal and stealing Marcus's research. But Marcus had created one last creature, the Queen Leech. When the traitors dumped Marcus's body at a nearby sewage treatment plant, the Leech was dumped with it. The Queen Leech survived and spent years consuming Marcus' body and brain, which caused it to absorb his memories. After years, the Queen Leech began to believe it was a reincarnated Marcus, and hungered for revenge against Spencer, Wesker, Birkin, and Umbrella.
Cannibalistic Murders
Marcus's facility was pretty much abandoned for years, while Birkin and Wesker continued his research. Wesker also had another role: he infiltrated the Raccoon City Police Department, where he became the leader of the S.T.A.R.S., or Special Tactics And Rescue Service, created by Chief of Police Brian Irons. In May 1998, strange murders began cropping up in the Arklays. Umbrella facilities in the area had started to suffer sabotage, which included a T-Virus containment failure at Spencer's mansion facility. As a precaution, staff weren't allowed to leave or contact the outside world, and T-Virus infection began to spread through the lab. The outbreak at the Spencer mansion facility allowed infected dogs to escape into the forests around the facility. The bodies of hikers and some Raccoon City residents were found soon after, and the crime scenes suggested the killer or killers had eaten the victims. The incidents seemed perpetrated by cannibals or even a cult, and were horrific enough to draw a lot of public attention. In July 1998, under pressure from the media, Irons and Wesker dispatched the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team to the mountains to investigate the murders. But discovering the murderers wasn't Wesker's mission: Instead, he had instructions from Umbrella to enter the mansion facility and salvage B.O.W. samples from the lab and destroy it. In the meantime, he was supposed to use the S.T.A.R.S. to gather combat data on the B.O.W.s in the facility, while also eliminating any witnesses.
Resident Evil 0
The exploits of Bravo Team are the subject of the 2002 prequel game, Resident Evil 0. Bravo headed out into the mountains by helicopter, only for a mechanical failure (the result of sabotage by Wesker) to force them to make an emergency landing. Trapped in the mountains, Bravo Team started its investigation anyway. Instead of heading to the Spencer mansion as Wesker had intended, however, the group discovered an abandoned military convoy, with documents inside suggesting the vehicle had been transporting Billy Coen, an accused murderer. With the soldiers escorting him now dead, Bravo started to suspect Coen might be the killer they were looking for. While most of Bravo wound up at the Spencer mansion, rookie Bravo Team medic Rebecca Chambers, one of the player characters in Resident Evil 0, discovered a stopped train, the Ecliptic Express. Boarding it, she discovered that its passengers were all dead--and then started to come back to life as zombies, thanks to the T-Virus. Escaping the creatures, Rebecca discovered Coen hiding on the train. The pair decided to work together to survive whatever was happening. Since the Spencer mansion facility was being destroyed, Wesker and Birkin had sent the train, filled with Umbrella researchers, to restart work at Marcus's former facility, which hadn't been in use since his death. But the Queen Leech, which was responsible for the other attacks and sabotage at Umbrella facilities in the area, attacked the train and killed everyone aboard. After the Ecliptic Express was stopped, Wesker and Birkin dispatched Umbrella soldiers to restart it, but they were attacked and killed by the Queen Leech too, sending the train careening toward the Umbrella facility. Rebecca and Billy managed to slow the train down, surviving the crash. The incident made it clear to Wesker and Birkin, finally, that Umbrella was being attacked--ostensibly by the dead James Marcus. Rebecca and Billy eventually destroyed the Queen Leech and escaped, while Wesker and Birkin separately activated the facility's self-destruct system and wiped out the T-Virus and the creatures there. Rebecca released Billy, whom she now believed was innocent, and maintained that he'd been killed. She went looking for the rest of Bravo Team; her search soon took her to the Spencer Mansion, where things got even worse.
Resident Evil
That brings us to the start of the original Resident Evil. Back in Raccoon City, Bravo Team had been missing for 24 hours. Wesker, still playing the role of the leader of S.T.A.R.S., took its Alpha Team via helicopter into the mountains to search for their comrades. The squad included the player characters, marksman Chris Redfield and former cat burglar Jill Valentine, as well as weapons expert Barry Burton. The team landed in the mountains, but were promptly attacked by dogs infected by the T-Virus. The team's pilot, Brad Vickers, panicked and lifted the helicopter away, forcing the team on the ground to retreat into a nearby structure: Spencer's maze-like mansion facility. The team worked their way through the mansion in an attempt to escape, fighting off the zombified staff, various experiments and research subjects (including the hideously mutated Lisa Trevor), and B.O.W.s created specifically to kill them. Along the way, they discovered some Bravo Team members, including Rebecca Chambers, and learned details about Umbrella's plans and programs. When they found Bravo Team's captain, he told them he thought there was a traitor in the unit, but Wesker killed him before he could definitively identify the S.T.A.R.S. leader as an Umbrella operative. Meanwhile, Wesker forced Burton to lure the remaining S.T.A.R.S. into various traps by threatening Burton's family, while he continued to gather combat data from the team's encounters with B.O.W.s. Unbeknownst to the rest of Umbrella, the incident the day before with the Queen Leech had caused Wesker to decide to steal B.O.W. samples and data and leave Umbrella for a rival company. After he was revealed as a traitor to the remnants of Alpha Team, Wesker unleashed Umbrella's most powerful creation, the Tyrant, on the S.T.A.R.S. However, as soon as it was released, the Tyrant promptly killed Wesker. Redfield, Valentine, and Chambers fought the Tyrant and managed to escape the facility before it self-destructed, thanks to Burton's help and the timely return of Vickers. What they didn't know was that Wesker had also survived. Guessing he wouldn't be able to control the Tyrant, he'd infected himself with a prototype T-Virus strain before releasing it, which allowed him to live through the Tyrant's attack and escape the facility before its destruction. Umbrella thought Wesker died in the mansion, which aided his plan--but he didn't manage to make off with what he'd hoped to steal.
Back In Raccoon City
The remaining S.T.A.R.S. managed to return to Raccoon City. Despite what they learned, their unit was disbanded and their investigation squashed--and no information about what Umbrella had done leaked out to the public. While the S.T.A.R.S. have gone their separate ways, Jill Valentine is still in Raccoon City. What happens to her there is the subject of Resident Evil 3, but we'll save that story for another time. That brings us to September 1998, two months after Resident Evil and Resident Evil 0, and the start of Resident Evil 2. Raccoon Police Department recruit Leon S. Kennedy is on his way to the city to join the force. At the same time, Claire Redfield, Chris's sister, is headed to Raccoon City to find her brother, whom she hasn't heard from in months. Both have no idea what to expect in Raccoon City.
By Kevin Wong on Jan 19, 2019 06:50 am
Most of the time (not all of the time), audiences and critics can spot crap at movie theaters easily. To paraphrase Potter Stewart: a bad movie may be hard to define, but you know it when you see it. And that initial verdict has a tendency to stick. Wooden dialogue, a poor actor, or an incompetent director will not, with the passage of time, become magically better. Of course, there are some bad movies become ironically beloved, or fall into that self-aware "so bad it's good" territory. However, there's a smaller group of movies that are too ahead of their time—too radical, groundbreaking, and weird—and are panned at the time of their release. They have since been critically rehabilitated and rediscovered, as public tastes have matured and changed. Here are 7 great movies that were originally misunderstood, but were later rediscovered and rehabilitated. If you like this gallery, check out our look at Samuel L. Jackson's greatest performances, as well as our ranking of M. Night Shyamalan's twists. Shyamalan's newest movie, Glass, is out now in theaters.
7. Fantasia (1940)
Fantasia was Walt Disney's pet project. He envisioned it as an ongoing, ever-changing experience, where classical music would be matched to animated sequences; as time went on, the best sequences would be retained, and new ones would be added. But the project never got off the ground, because the first film flopped so terribly. In the '60s it was rediscovered as a mind-expanding art film, when the hippie culture embraced its bright, swirling colors. Another attempt at restarting the Fantasia project took place in in 1999, when the Disney company released Fantasia 2000. It also performed poorly.
6. Psycho (1960)
Psycho is Hitchcock's most well-known film. At the time of its release, though, it was seen as second-rate, low class and vulgar. The Oedipal overtones between Mrs. Bates and Norman freaked audiences out, and the shower scene, which reads on a more figurative level as a sexual assault, violated critics' sensibilities. But modern audiences are more desensitized. And the once-derided shower scene is now seen as a master class in filmmaking: 52 cuts were edited together to create the impression of violence, even though the knife's blade never once touches Janet Leigh's skin.
5. The Shining (1980)
When Stanley Kubrick's The Shining came out in 1980, it received mixed reviews. Jack Nicholson, who had previously played an insane person in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was criticized as typecast. Shelley Duvall, who played his wife, was derided as shrill and unsympathetic. And Stephen King, who wrote the original novel, famously disliked the movie; he felt it was extremely well-made, but lacked any warmth or heart at its core. But popular culture has been kind to The Shining. So many scenes have been paid tribute to and parodied in the years since. The blood spilling out of the elevator. The twins in the hallway. And of course, the indelible image of Jack axing his way through the door, yelling "Heeere's Johnny!" as he tries to REDRUM his wife.
4. Blade Runner (1982)
Blade Runner was a forerunner of the cyberpunk genre; its moody neon lighting and slow pace has influenced scores of science fiction films that came after it. So it's hard to believe that at the time of its release, the film didn't make back its budget and split critics down the middle. Some of this has to do with timing. Lead actor Harrison Ford was fresh off playing Han Solo in Star Wars, and audiences expected something different than what they got. But critical opinion has since changed, and filmmaker Ridley Scott has gone back and recut the film several times to get it closer to his original vision. A sequel, Blade Runner 2049, was released in 2017.
3. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Stanley Kubrick is a polarizing filmmaker, and of course, his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, didn't break his streak. Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film underwent several casting changes, and had a shoot schedule that lasted over 52 weeks. Audiences were expecting to see an erotic thriller with wall-to-wall sex, and instead, they got this glacial film, which featured a clinical, loveless masked orgy. It's only now, 20 years later, that people have begun to reassess the film as a misunderstood masterpiece, that calls out the corruption and decadence of the elite 1%.
2. Fight Club (1999)
Unapologetically ultraviolent, cynical, and anarchist, Fight Club is a misunderstood satire. It divided critics who felt that its message was mixed, and endorsed the very violence it was parodying. It failed at the box office as well. But years later, it's seen as a prescient commentary on modern consumerism, and the complexity of embracing one's masculinity in the modern age.
1. Unbreakable (2000)
Any director is lucky to have a massive, critical darling like The Sixth Sense in his ouveure. But, for M. Night Shyamalan, it has been a critical millstone around his neck; it's the film that he can never top. Unbreakable had the misfortune of being his follow-up film to the Sixth Sense. It also missed the massive superhero boom by a couple years, and was instead marketed as a dramatic thriller. Time has redeemed Shyamalan; the production and success of Split, and the release of Glass, bear that out.
By Dan Auty on Jan 19, 2019 03:14 am
Horror movie story ideas can come from many different places. Fiction is very popular source of material, with such a rich and long history of novels and stories for screenwriters to tap into. Sequels and reboots obviously play a big part too--this is a genre that has always rewarded repetition, and many of the longest-running franchises ever are scary movies. And of course, there are plenty of original movies too--even the biggest horror franchise started with a single movie, and many of the best are terrifying narratives conjured up by imaginative writers. Urban legends are another popular source of horror storytelling. These exist in the grey area between fact and fiction--popular myths that are handed down and retold over generations, stories that have been rarely experienced first-hand, but could just be true. Over the years some of the best known urban legends--from Bloody Mary to the killer calling from within the house--have inspired horror filmmakers and created some memorably scary cinema. Some of these films use an urban legend without acknowledging that they are a common myth, treating them simply as a brilliantly scary idea. Then there are those that are more overt, and play on an audience's awareness of common legends, whether its characters researching them, or perhaps using them as a basis for some terrible crimes. Other times, multiple urban legends are combined to create a new mythology. Regardless of how they're used, urban legends remain a consistent and potent source for horror movies, and here are some of scariest examples ever made.
12. The Burning (1980)
The Staten Island legend of Cropsey--an escaped child killer that became the inspiration for two movies and an acclaimed documentary--has been used to terrify kids for decades. The best known film version is The Burning, in which the legend is used as the basis for a generic but entertaining post-Friday the 13th slasher movie. In this film, Cropsey is a caretaker at a lakeside holiday camp who returns to exact gory revenge after he is horribly disfigured in a cruel prank.
11. Dead Man's Curve (1998)
There were actually two movies made in 1998 based on the myth that if a college student commits suicide then his roommates will automatically be granted a 4.0 grade--Dead Man on Campus and Dead Man's Curve (aka Curve). The former plays out as a silly comedy, but Dead Man's Curve takes a darker approach. A pair of struggling Harvard students plot to kill their roommate and make the death look like suicide, in order to claim the high grade. Inevitably things don't go quite to plan. The movie still has plenty of dark laughs (let's face it, the whole legend is kinda ridiculous), but it's also a tense, enjoyably nasty thriller with great performances from Scream's Matthew Lillard and pre-Americans Keri Russell.
10. Turistas (2006)
One of the more gruesome urban legends is organ theft, involving an organized criminal network which runs a black market for organs taken from kidnapped victims. The movie Turistas (aka Paradise Lost) taps into this, and is part of that post-Hostel strain of horror that puts dumb American tourists in very unpleasant situations in a scary foreign country. Here, a group of backpackers are targeted by an organ-harvesting gang while exploring Brazil. Unsurprisingly, the movie was met with some protests in Brazil, but it's an effective little chiller and certainly taps into some scary primal fears.
9. When A Stranger Calls (1979)
The legend of the babysitter and the killer who is calling from within the house is such a perfect set-up for a horror movie that it has been used several times. The first 20 minutes of When A Stranger Calls is a pretty straight adaptation of the legend, as a babysitter is menaced down the phoneline. This lengthy sequence is brilliantly tense, and was a big influence on the opening sequence of Wes Craven's Scream many years later. The rest of the movie is less impressive, but it's still considerably better than the terrible 2006 remake.
8. The Amityville Horror (1979)
112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, Long Island is one of the best known addresses in urban horror legend. In 1974 a man named Ronald DeFeo killed six members of his family there, and ever since it has become infamous for being a house where very bad things happen to its residents. The 1979 horror smash The Amityville Horror was based on the best-selling non-fiction book of the same name. It charts the terrifying experiences of George and Kathy Lutz, played here by James Brolin and Margot Kidder, who moved into the house a year after the murders. Even though all the wild paranormal claims made by the Lutzes have been subsequently debunked, the notoriety of 112 Ocean Avenue continues to this day.
7. The Mothman Prophecies (2002)
The story of the Mothman dates back to 1966, when residents in West Virginia claim to have seen a winged humanoid creature in the sky. The 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies explored this legend and became the basis of this 2002 movie. In the film, Richard Gere plays a reporter who is researching the Mothman stories, and finds himself drawn into a supernatural mystery involving flying creatures, terrifying premonitions, and memories of his dead wife. It's a flawed but atmospheric and ambitious movie, that tries to something more than just presents an old legend in a scary way.
6. Willow Creek (2013)
The legend of Bigfoot is one of the best known urban myths, and has been the inspiration for much storytelling over the decades. One of the best movie versions is Willow Creek, directed by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait and notable for the fact that it barely features the monster at all. Instead, it invokes serious scares through the use of sound and suggestion, as a pair of young campers found themselves terrorised by the Bigfoot when they decide to explore the various myths about its existence. The scariest scene is an unbroken 20-minute sequence, as the couple cower in their tent while something seriously terrifying stomps around in the woods outside.
4. Urban Legend (1998)
Most of the movies on the list take a single legend and use it as a part of an otherwise original story. But as the title of this post-Scream slasher suggests, Urban Legend is a celebration of these myths. It's based around a killer whose trail of mayhem is inspired by different urban legends, with each student victim (including a young Jared Leto) dispatched in a different, inventive way. From the killer hiding in the backseat of the car to a death from mixing pop rocks and soda (or in this case, cleaning chemicals), it's great fun to anticipate which legend will be used to dispatch the next unlucky teenager.
5. Triangle (2009)
The Bermuda Triangle is an area of the Atlantic Ocean that has become infamous for causing the supposed disappearance of dozens of boats and places over the years. It's also the perfect location for a mind-warping horror movie, and Triangle is exactly that. A group of vacationing friends end up in the Triangle and encounter a seemingly deserted cruise liner. Inevitably, very strange things start happening, and the result is a superb blend of old-fashioned scares and elliptical Memento-style storytelling involving doppelgangers and time loops.
3. Alligator (1980)
The legend of baby alligators that were flushed into New York's sewers and grew to become huge man-eating predators has been around since the 1920s, so it's surprising it took until 1980 for a movie based on this myth to arrive. Luckily, Alligator is a hugely entertaining B-movie romp, helped by a great script from indie auteur John Sayles and terrific lead performance from the great Robert Forster (Jackie Brown, Twin Peaks). It's a fast-moving, witty film that works as both an affectionate parody of monster movies, and an effective creature feature in its own right.
2. Black Christmas (1974)
Bob Clark's seminal seasonal slasher is perhaps the best example of the killer inside the house legend. A group of students are menaced at Christmas by a campus killer who torments them over a phone line, and while anyone familiar with the legend won't be particularly surprised at the big reveal, but it's still a tense and scary film.
1. Candyman (1992)
Bernard Rose's terrifying Clive Barker adaptation combine two separate urban legends to create one of the '90s most memorable movie monsters. Most notably, there's the legend of Bloody Mary, an evil spirit who appears if you say her name repeatedly into a mirror--in this case repeating "Candyman" five time summons the vengeful former slave of the title. There's also the legend of The Hook, an escaped mental patient who uses his hooked hand as a deadly weapon. The story of the film also embraces the power of such scary myths, with the main character herself writing a thesis on urban legends.
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