Stumbling towards me in the middle of the night. Her vocal chords torn apart by her own violation, blood pours from unknown places. Is it her blood? Will it be mine? Can it? The woman is singing in stark white: an opera dress draped tightly over her sexualized, dead figure. Being dead does nothing to remove her from I no more than it does to remove I from her. 

There’s a joke about them making a Zombie hot enough I don’t want to shoot her: I do. Even when she lurches towards me in that kind-of-canned animation way her fingers tent into a little heart shape. I don’t mean to. I really don’t. You’re really pretty, you’re just not my type – not yet. Too dead.  Will it be a joke by the time we get to the end? 

But now the great old house is quiet. The other singer isn’t as pretty as you, and isn’t as young as you. I don’t like her as much. So I reload a save even though it drops hours off of the end of my life I will never return to like failed timelines to a place where she still wanders the halls and sings her song. If the player waits long enough on the central floor of this place she can hear scraps of the songbird’s life repeated infinitely. 

There’s kind of a funny thing that happens at the end of Resident Evil 9. The newest in Capcom’s long running Resident Evil series that originally started on the Sony Playstation in 1996. Before I can get to that though – there are several areas of this mansion we need to backtrack through. You and me, players of these games — we inhabit the roles of panicked survivor, brave commando, hired gun and violent colonialist all in one from game to game. 

Here are some names to dispense with that will matter for the rest of our Survival Horror: Leon Kennedy (the protagonist of Resident Evil 2 and Half 9), Grace Ashford (the protagonist of half of Resident Evil 9). Leon is a paramilitary tough-guy with a sharp axe and a sharper jawline. Grace is a terrified, useless, crybaby femme meant in long tradition of survival horror for the player to feel protective over. 

She will get several upgrades that make it easier to kill things before she can be fully determined useful by the plot. 

Resident Evil’s primary locus of delivery is called the T-Virus. There are other names in the series, like T-Veronica Virus, G-Virus, Progenitor Virus, Las Plagas but generally function to create the events of the game: You are a (pick one): Hapless Survivor, Police Officer, Military Commander, Concerned Wifeguy and you are going to: (pick one) Investigate a Mansion, Laboratory or Building. Because generally in one way or another, Someone is Missing. 

Across 9+ Titles including spin-offs, the genes of Resident Evil borrow heavily from 1980’s action movies and creature features: ironically they don’t have much evolution or mutation themselves. 

In George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead the cultural significance of the Haitian inspired Zonbi was ironically killed: an agent of folklore horror with a strange colonialist legacy of being utilized to create fear of occult religious practices wrapped up in racism going back more than a hundred years suddenly exterminated not with a bullet but on celluloid. The New American Zombie was here and with it, like many other forms of American art it represented both expansion and reduction. Night of the Living Dead concerned themes like Patriarchal Violence and Small Town racism as a metaphor for the 1960’s suburb cannibalized everything that relied on it. In the end of the movie, our black protagonist is summarily gunned down by a racist mob who doesn’t bother to differentiate him between the roving undead they now have carte blanche to gun down en masse. 

Media post Night of the Living Dead had two types of undead to deal with: now there was a fiercely politicized metaphor meant to give a frightening visual language to the way America will find acceptable targets of violence through othering. The other dispenses with metaphor and remains solely the frightful creature: this is often the Zombie we find in Videogames. Call of Duty: Zombies or the industrial lab nightmares of Resident Evil. 

Zombies aren’t really people in Resident Evil the way they are set dressing, obstacles or environmental details. There are reports, itchy scratchy writings on torn paper that detail rich inner lives torn apart by plot twists. Panicked researchers detailing that the monster is in the room with them already, as I’m writing this and!- 

In Camilla Fojas’ Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Capitalism in Pop Culture, the author notes: “(The Zombie to be)-a loaded cultural figure that symbolizes a number of social fears about disaster, ruin, and dehumanization. The zombie marks the return of something long dead, something unresolved, put to rest, but never really mourned or purged.” And so the living dead returns in every dark place we can find in pop culture: abandoned alleyways, shopping malls, often places associated with economic ruin or ironic downturn – It’s easy to imagine the same mall from Dawn of the Dead now empty and host to bizarre creatures bathed in LEDs and dust-shaded sunlight as it once was to imagine the total undead takeover. 

Resident Evil 9 is built on that legacy of vacant pop culture. In KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS a character is killed when the protagonist gives them too many names. So goes the rule for all devils: every new name draws power and aspect away from something concrete. Resident Evil has altogether almost as many disparate viruses as entries in the series: and even Resident Evil 9 knows all this needs to be wrapped up in a bow, a little looking in the mirror too long and winking at the player. 

We’re asked by the first part of the game as Grace Ashcroft to get to know our Zombies. The series has experimented with this since the original title was remade in 2002. Alexia Ashford is a pathetic, violent and dangerous victim of the evil pharmaceutical corp Umbrella. She is the natural result of the Monster-Movie Zombie. Disfigured and displaced by someone with power over her — uniquely the only monster in the game that is a woman and so, once again in the grand tradition of survival horror we are meant to feel sympathy towards her. 

Lurching towards this again in Resident Evil 7 is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre inspired family of cannibals driven mad by Mold deployed by a pharmaceutical company for testing on humans. The Baker family are Hideous Southerners — like characters in renaissance paintings used to depict the twin mire of grotesquerie and opulence. A decaying manor deep in the bayou that stands as a crossroads for familial abuse. They’re one of the new names given in the series that kicked off their own art movement, a renaissance of Resident Evil by any other name. 

Our titular Evil Residents of RE7 stand in for something much more important to the new series direction. Fidelity has been brought by consoles powered by even rarer metals than ever before, and with that comes chasing detail in every other way. Seven’s fixation on a deeper, personal type of horror sets the stage for the new iterations that have come after including remakes. 

 

In the pursuit of new detail comes what I need to keep as short hand here: many of the things capable of being read into older Resident Evil games because of the lack of detail. Now the detail has come with an ugly virus under the surface. Teeming beneath the skin of our new incredibly beautiful, hot protagonists are the collection of diseased neurosis that come in pursuit of making something apolitical. 

The Bakers can stand in for truly acceptable targets for the player: legacied white southerners twisted by a shadowy conspiracy and pharmaceutical companies. Cannibal sociopaths driven murderous by circumstance. Unlike the family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre they don’t truly want to be this way, and so we as players and Ethan the character are driven to repeatedly brutalize their immortal bodies as they seek to do the same to us. 

For a story set in the south with such the genre trappings of American Gothic there are no black characters in Resident Evil 7. I want to note this to be pithy: it’s likely because as the history goes, Resident Evil as a franchise seldom has room for heroic black characters and it is likely if one had a role in RE7 at all it would have been as antagonist. 

There are acceptable targets for violence in the real world: a variety of crime statistics, racist reporting, police shootings and institutional bigotry towards Black Americans. In this real makeup of historical violence there’s an interesting history of the body and The Zombie without even going into the complicated history of the word. (See further reading, below.) 

While the real world lurches more towards non-fantasy violence as an outlet for modern politics, Resident Evil attempts to leave what parts of the real world intruded behind: just as at the same time pop culture itself finds new emptiness replaced with dozens of books by women of color about Zombies. Including more historical examples as well as the gnawing gnashing teeth of cadavers craving brains. 

On the internet, in books, editorials and academic writing there are thousands of published words about the way we use fiction to explore relationships of comfortable violence. The horror of The Night of the Living Dead eventually gave way to the modern apocalyptic Zombie Fantasy. 

It’s all too clear to imagine who another White man with a rifle sticker on his car would happily gun down with a smile on their face, if you’ve ever had to be in a room while a group of them excitedly riff out a plan to survive hypothetical zombie apocalypses. Looking desperately for the exit while clutching a drink that doesn’t have enough liquid in it to drown them, or me. 

In the freeform atmospheric survival game DayZ and the ways player interaction can cause cooperation to achieve victory. At the barrel of a gun, player interaction can also leave room for a variety of player-on-player violence sometimes used to spectacularly entertaining results: and where there is room for there is room for the type of violence that goes beyond a 3D model activating a ray-cast projectile through the digital corpus of another player. 

At the same time as the Zombie genre in white-pop culture seems to become as militarized as western police forces, Resident Evil has used technology to explore increasingly more personal feuds with the undead. 

Resident Evil 8 introduced villains so personally interested in the player as to become charming. In castles packed with enemies no more complex than previous shambling mounds of the series are a cast of deadly pursuer type enemies that spit vitriol into the territory of deliberately fucking with the player-as-Ethan perspective the story is told in. A now-internet famous cuckolding scenario kicks off a game about breaking into several women’s houses and murdering them. 

Resident Evil 2 took something familiar and used player experience and nostalgia to ramp up horror through extreme graphical violence. While the series polishes off the edges I particularly cared for it dials up the type of gore I crave for breakfast. In doing so it turns our antisocial beleaguered failure from the end and turns him into a harmless twink, while Claire Redfield is similarly yassified into a somehow simpler character than one originally rendered on a Sony Playstation (1998). 

I can occasionally be pithy about Resident Evil: It’s worth it sometimes as you get older to let an important relationship with a work of fiction curdle. I might go so far as to say it’s best if at least that happens as it can at least prevent the way nostalgia moors us to a past we can never escape. I might add, similarly if I was a character in the modern Resident Evil games: “Fuck!” “Shit,” “Piss” or “Ass!” Any time I need to reliably emote fear or surprise that a guy’s skull is hanging off of his face. 

Resident Evil 4 plays with the conventions of remaking Resident Evil 4 by ardently sticking to the plot as an excuse for the most dressed up crowd shooting mechanics of all time. The already marble foundation of the original is multiplied with bigger crowds, more expressive animations and abilities to react to the player. Leon himself, the protagonist, is an extremely high fidelity protagonist, an absurdly dry sadist that lacks the goofy charm of the original. Potentially the only thing novel is that it allows his relationship with Ashley Graham to read as reliably creepy. 

If I died tomorrow, I’d have to pick a hall to endlessly haunt like Selena Corey. See the thing is, I’m 34 years old. I don’t all that much care about what Resident Evil means now, I’ve built my own relationship to it just like you have. There is a late game twist as my efforts to list all of the games in the post-remake series finally make it to Resident Evil 9 and I no longer have to list the title of something in italics as a product. 

The game has a late twist, that Grace Ashcroft unwittingly holds the key to reversal of Oswell E Spencer’s efforts to genocide the human race through Zombie Plagues. In doing so she gets everything she wants: a reversal of the scene that Welcomes her to The Survival Horror. Even her lone-wolf-and-cub sidekick of a sick young girl riddled with Zombie Blood is implied to have been okay after a hideous transformation and puncturing by Leon Kennedy Bullets. 

I finished the game thinking about Selena Corey. I killed every other rank and file undead by the time I even set foot in Leon’s shoes except for her. It was like a mirror. Ghastly and ghostly pale. She sang a broken sonnet for no one but the player.

And we’ve come to our auditorium, Resident Evil 9. In a way it’s fitting that the series circles it’s own canon with rumors of the next iteration being a remake of the original: 9 returns Leon Kennedy from the second game, and gives us a new protagonist in Grace Ashcroft. 

The body of Grace Ashcroft has the telltale Capcom hallmarks: childish, a round face, giant expressive eyes. Next to the old-man filter applied to Leon’s face she looks out of place in this world of mutants and monsters. Intentionally so: her inner strength is her ability to yelp in the face of danger and seemingly be fucked with by the entire world just for existing. 

In the context of the rest of the women of the series, Grace might be a little insulting if she wasn’t entirely what the series has kind of been shambling towards the entire time: she has an easily identifiable design through her platinum blonde hair like Ashley Graham. Her body is uncharacteristically lithe and petite for her profession and subject to gross-out moments male characters of the series never are like Jill Valentine (Resident Evil 3). Finally, giving her agency or character is replaced with doe-eyed obliviousness together with Claire Redfield’s other remake personality trait: harsh language in exchange for an emotional arc. 

And she doesn’t sing like you. And the blood on her body will never look like yours.
The only other women Grace Ashford interacts with in the game are already undead, or used as her motivation for personal retribution against the antagonists. Her friends here are a pair of opera singers, both mentioned earlier and the three or so cleaning-lady zombies she can interact with. 

My fascination with the blood-soaked singer can’t be called…professional. The greatest rule of Camp might be to find something desirable in the undesirable. Selena Corey lacks the obvious sexualization of Lady Dimitrescu (which through DLC can almost be comedically attached to Grace’s own waifish stand in for personality) and the internet seems uniquely obsessed with pictures of who she might have been pre-transition (into a Zombie.) 

Videogames can’t happen outside of the borders of the screen. They splinter off into ugly things like fandom-based consumption culture. Videogames end when we turn them off and that is irreversibly. Highly canonized screen fuel meant to create conversation on social media. Selena Corey is obviously designed (by men) to elicit a reaction. That Videogames are no longer primarily a leisure focus of just men is irrelevant. She, like me, has a body designed for consumption

Grace and Ashley, Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and Sheva Alomar (Resident Evil 5): blank slates of desire but desire checked first by teenage boyhood turned into something where fawning becomes adoration. I want to grow up to be just like them: useful, practical, adherents to the narrative. Richly sexualized through gore and violence. Too pretty to be Camp and too beautiful to be given the narrative weight of the men the series orbits.

In November of 2021, I started taking recreational drugs. Raised on years of posts where I correctly identified the tell-tale signs of Testosterone poisoning I began to rapidly dose myself with a suite of chemicals designed to change my body. The old skin went away and was replaced by something softer but my teeth are calcium bones meant to bite. I’m hungry. I’m so goddamned itchy and I want to sing. Videogames only happen on screen. The dead woman can’t talk to me outside of black plastic borders. 

I don’t want to see them cured, more useful as a Zombie than they ever were pre-transition. Would we have met otherwise? Would I know her like I do now?

You can read as deep as you like: maybe I never even beat Resident Evil 9. Maybe I’m dead in that hall letting her sink her teeth in me. Grace Ashcroft letting out one final purifying breath as she feels the lips rendered soft and vacant by muscles that no longer pull taut. Both of us finding something familiar in each other. 

TO BE CONTINUED. WE ARE NOT DONE WITH THE BODY.