Resident Evil VII and Environmental Horror

Resident Evil VII is not just one of my favorite horror experiences, but one of my favorite games to date, period. Not only does this game mean so much to me as a standalone experience, but it serves as an inspirational guidebook for an aspiring filmmaker like me who’s interested in genres like horror. Having also completed the fantastic Resident Evil 9: Requiem, I felt as if celebrating VII’s presentation could serve as a kind of celebratory remembrance in its own right, as I recall its unique visceralness. 

Inspired by the likes of film franchises such as SAW, Evil Dead, Blair Witch Project, and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Resident Evil VII’s stomping grounds for unhinged torment, daunt a backwoods bayou estate turned diseased madhouse, once owned by the now-diseased Baker family. Stepping inside a barely standing, maze-like property of sprawling rotting wood, what lies ahead is a scenic gaze lathered with a blackened ooze of hazardous fungi. Like bacterial splashes of twisted paint onto an unsuspecting canvas, a mutation makes itself at home, having overtaken most of the property. While most of the Baker Family poses as bosses throughout the game’s progression, in between appear fungal henchmen born out of walls, floors, and ceilings.

Derangedly decorated throughout this haunted-like house of bacterial horror is a decorum akin to post-apocalyptic or occultism. Saw blades and baby dolls dangle from the ends of rope. Tied together in a circle are severed animal legs, as a cow’s head is placed in the middle. Mannequin heads are stuffed in toilets and barbed wire is tied around their headless chest stands. Refrigerators overflow with sacks of infected meat, sludge, and carcasses. Scattered about this hazardous maze are a slew of collectables, from mysterious videotapes providing clarity and clues to the survival forward, to journalistic medical notes, documentation of kidnappings, and torturous “scientific” experiments.

From a quaint-sized backyard harbouring a torturous guest home of sadistic games, to the jaggedly-shaped, blackened trees and eerily calm waters of a bayou containing even infected alligators, to the more killzones inside and out of the backwoods estate, breathing room is sparse. Every step the player takes, only makes its way toward another corner of grime, grisel, blood, and sludge. The seventh mainline installment of Resident Evil’s aestheticism, feels akin to staring down the mechanical interior of a heavily-used industrial grill - witnessing its violently stained rustedness, the humming of a gas-lit flame, and the multi-flavored puddles of the foul-stenching cooking grease combined with melted food. The visual presentation of what Resident Evil VII feels as unforgivingly harsh and sharp to the senses, as the ear-piercing whining of an activated chainsaw under the dry and dusty Texas desert.

Littered throughout this literal Hell on Earth, is ripe with iconic scripted and freeform gameplay. One iconic moment for myself, remains to be fearfully stepping down stairs and into a dimly-lit and extensively-sized concrete basement of experimentation. Now, the basement in horror media, has always been a staple of scares for artists who find themselves tackling the idea of a house of horrors. This particular basement felt no different. Possessing a room like a funeral home-esqe incinerator section, to a whole brick and mortar morgue with jail-like bars, and bagged corpses hanging from the ceiling, this remains an iconic a kill room and boss fight, where an unstoppable death-lusting Baker family member awaits with giant hedge clippers.

Resident Evil VII’s twisted approach of pitting players against bioweaponized viciousness is nothing short of stunningly memorable. The filth-crazed and environmentally dilapidated entry’s violent and hopeless gauntlet of hellish grime can hopefully provide a scratch to the itch horror fans have been looking for since seeing Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead (2013). Through these carnage-filled bowels of the infected property grounds in which you dig your heels deeper into, it is a surprise to realize that this crusade through the bloodthirsty and hazardous, lasts for ONLY a single night. Time flies when you’re having fun, but for our main character, the night seems to STILL be young.

--Julian Enghauser

Guest Writer for 88.3 FM WXOU