When I first heard about Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, starring Austin Abrams, I was thrilled to have a chance to see a critically acclaimed movie from a game I have witnessed (not played…) for thousands of hours. As I watched it, I found myself fascinated by the way my brain was able to process gore and disturbing images of the body and how this process mirrored my experience of watching the game.
As someone who typically interacts with body horror depending on the level of animation (experiencing a high-tolerance with the cartoon-figures of anime and an extremely low tolerance with news reels), I was surprised that my fear reaction did not seem to lie somewhere between the thin veneer of photorealistic games and flesh-and-blood recording. I wonder: what is the line between comfort and discomfort in body horror? When does the human mind become truly avoidant or caught in a loop of rubbernecking and morbid curiosity?
First, in the game, my tolerance to gore hinges on two factors: the presence of human consciousness and the sheer absurdity of the image. As a partner to an avid Resident Evil player, I have watched t-virus infected zombies in the background of books, blog posts, doom-scrolling sessions, and well, my daily life.
Yet, sometimes, I had to look away (of course, ignoring the cringing anticipation of a jumpscare). When a zombie’s bent wrist would catch in my mind, looking too human and too uncanny all at once. When one zombie on a meat hook told my partner to go, get out, signaling residues of their human consciousness. When the POV zooms and lingers on their faces in agony, streaked with tears. I found myself averting my eyes when the zombies approximated what makes suffering human, what makes their vitriol broken over menacing.
Other times, I would get caught in a loop of horrors, looking away and looking back at their particularly gruesome deaths, hoping that I wouldn’t pay for my rubbernecking in the currency of nightmares. When 115 zombies get pulverized in the meat grinder in Resident Evil Requiem and Grace is washed away in a sea of their blood, I had a sneaking suspicion I might not be able to forget those images—and, in some ways, I haven’t. In others, that scene is less haunting because it transcends the amount of gore my human mind is able to comprehend. It becomes absurd, outside-of-reality, and thus, able to be dismissed.
In Zach Creggar’s Resident Evil, my ability to tolerate gore and the anticipation of seeing a gory image (and the ever-splitting-seconds decisions to look or look away) hinged similarly on whether or not the impacted body was closer to human or monster.
When Bryan hits the first woman with his car, my fear-driven anticipation of what an infected human would look like in the film adaptation was at an all time high. This fear continued as we saw her mostly-human-presenting body bent out of shape, shaking as anyone would after being hit by a car, and as we see Bryan treat her as if she is human. Yet, as she begins scurrying around the cop car on all fours and roaring like a monster, her form becomes easier to look at, to understand her as a monster that will meet a gory end.
My brain’s ability to distinguish the first zombie as a woman first and a monster second depending on her movements and behavior raises a question. Does the visible presence of consciousness impact the comfort with which we can view the disfigured, misshapen zombie body? Does the reaction to gore change if we can’t see the monster’s human face, the redness in their eyes or their mannerisms?
As the movie continued, I found that my ability to look (or look away) remained on the body part level too. Bryan’s arm is more disturbing as it evolves from bite to parasitic, swollen black webs across his skin, than he is as his final form, gangly monster consuming scientists left and right until he has far too many limbs and eyes that wave and sparkle for the news helicopter.
The little girl’s foot is more disturbing when we get the first glimpse of it on the bottom of the screen, then when we see its tendrils wrapped around the toilet bowl. It’s as if once my brain was able to see her as a creature, her foot became something mythical, inhuman, and therefore, more comfortable to perceive.
Of course, CGI, special effects, and costuming plays a role in the ability for my brain to dismiss fear and compartmentalize the monsters as what they were in the game: animations. Yet, there are cases where a CGI scene is both comfortable and uncomfortable to perceive depending on what is being depicted.
For example, when the woman is decapitated by Bryan’s shotgun, I couldn’t look at her severed neck when it was only a bleeding stump, disturbed by how the scene creates an image in my head for a horror I read about in the news, see statistics about on social media. So, I looked away until the image became inhuman. Once the plagas parasite’s fleshy tendrils start to wiggle out of the neck, the image falls into the category of morbid curiosity where I keep looking as it gets worse and worse.
Ultimately, my tolerance for body horror and gore relies on my brain’s endless pursuit to categorize what it sees. Scenes outside the realm of reality are treated as fiction, while the images that remind me of humanity become the language of my real-world anxieties. I pull away not from the image of blood or the disfigured body, but from human suffering. In the end, we hide because we are terrified of what we might recognize and what we might see in the mirror of our own morbid curiosity.
Sept. 29, 2026.
