Whether you thought it was a good video game adaptation or a poor one, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil swung for some fences. In addition to some good zombie stuff, the standout creature was an ever-growing mass of flesh and appendages. This thing, like a Koosh ball made of people, follows our hapless courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) through the entire movie. But, what is not perhaps immediately evident, like much of the rest of the movie, the film used real people to create the Merged Monster. And we know this because Jakub Hudlicky, the movement coordinator, posted rehearsal footage.
The clips show different configurations of stunt and movement performers lashed together, standing back to back. Flipping and/or cartwheeling end over end looks kind of fun, but in the context of the movie, it’s terrifying. It’s actually more upsetting with fewer people. Several of the slides in the Instagram post feature a Merged Monster made up of three people. Tumbling like a wagon wheel is just the right level of uncanny weirdness if you ask me.
The videos come from July of 2025, right at the beginning of production. The team’s first job was to determine exactly how the Merged Monster would move. If you’ve seen the final product, it seems like most of the preliminary rehearsals found their way into it. This also gives a good indicator that, should they ever choose to, creatures from games like Inside and Carrion could also easily make their way to live-action movie screens.
I was a big fan of Resident Evil. In specific, the way Cregger and company utilized real locations, sets, and effects where possible. It made the body horror much more tangible. And you can’t get much more tangible than literally tying people together and asking them to move as a single entity.