There are many reasons to love Resident Evil 4, but what jumped out at me while playing the remake is that it feels like a medley of homages to monsters and antagonists from the greatest horror movies of all time. there is no way to know the number that is It’s my own brain that intentionally nods to other fiction and jumps to conclusions, but it’s still fun to dissect the many oddities that make up this game’s masterpiece.
A chainsaw-wielding, burlap-sacked Dr. Salvador takes inspiration from Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jason Voorhees’ baggy, athletic look from Friday the 13th Part 2. may not be. Del Lago might be more of a salamander than a shark, but that whole boss fight would be at home in Act 3 of the Jaws movie, where the beefy Elle and his Gigante are in the ring’s fellow cave trolls. very similar. This is even more apparent in the remake, as in the later Encounter of El Gigante, the giant wears armor that fits perfectly with the dress code of Sauron’s ranks. Maybe not, but remember that the Lord of the Rings movies were on everyone’s mind when RE4 was in development.
Las Plagas, the parasite that serves as the connective tissue in Resident Evil 4’s monster menagerie, looks like a distant cousin to the face-hugging larvae made famous in Alien. Throughout the game, we see Plaga genetically engineered into all sorts of creatures, some of them specifically Xenomorphians. The societies mimic alien bugs, but there are also smooth, black, whip-tailed verdugos that resemble the first alien’s sole monster in appearance and behavior.
“
Meanwhile, every time one of Resident Evil 4’s Ganados reveals its inner plaga, there’s an explosion of flesh, teeth, eyes, and claws straight out of John Carpenter’s The Thing’s famous creature playbook. Just as The Thing has some increasingly impressive forms, so do RE4’s villains, ultimately both being masses of towering tentacles that don’t even try to look human. It takes on a gigantic final form.
Video games have forever taken their beats from action movies, but Resident Evil 4 takes the series from tense survival horror to fast-paced action horror, much like James Cameron’s approach to sequels. Alien turns an alien haunted house into a roller coaster ride, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day is more fight than flight compared to the first film. Freeze in nitrogen and drop Los Gigantes into a vat of molten metal. Regenerators, on the other hand, may not be able to transform into molten metal or impersonate members of the LAPD, but they are just as difficult to kill as the T-1000.
Stephen Sommers may not be as famous a filmmaker as James Cameron, but some of his action-horror movies seem to have inspired Resident Evil 4. Turned off with a shotgun blast to the eyeball, the explosive climax involves a man and a woman fleeing the collapsing structure on jet skis. Sound familiar?
“
One terrifying boss that unfortunately (or thankfully) didn’t make it into the remake is U-3, a chimera that fuses human and scorpion anatomy. Another Stephen Sommers and his CGI collaboration, maybe pulled from his GameCube games. Coincidentally, in his third installment of The Mummy, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Brendan sees his Fraser character wearing a fleece-lined leather jacket similar to Leon’s. , Resident Evil fans will be familiar with Thompson as the Chicago typewriter, armed with his submachine gun.
Horror author H.P. Lovecraft’s influence in pop culture cannot be overstated, but feature film adaptations of his work rarely achieve anything more than cult status (see how much Lovecraft’s work has been involved in with cults). (This is appropriate, given the , the 2001 Stuart Gordon film Dagon seems to be Resident Evil 4’s single biggest inspiration.
Despite being named after the short story Dagon, it follows more closely into the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The film follows a man trying to save his girlfriend who has been kidnapped by members of a cult that worships ancient sea monsters. Many of them have mutated into sea creatures.While the novel is set on the coast of New England, the film is set in a Spanish fishing village named “Imboca” (Boca means “mouth” in Spanish). so cute). It’s unclear why the game also takes place in Spain, but it works.
Unless you delve into the original development team about what crossed your mind while making the original 20 years ago, it’s hard to tell what parts of Resident Evil 4 are rooted in other works of horror fiction. Impossible to say. It ultimately doesn’t matter where the individual pieces of Resident Evil 4 come from, because how they fit together creates something completely unique and wonderfully nightmarish.
