Silent Hill’s Best New Adaptation Beats Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil To The Punch

If Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil was not titled ‘Resident Evil,’ fans would not be wrong to mistake it for a random horror movie based on its reveal trailer. There isn’t much at all that seems to be a faithful adaptation of the games in terms of story or characters—particularly Resident Evil 2, when Raccoon City endured its swift T-virus outbreak—and monstrosities such as the obese figure in the sewer or the amalgamation of bodies that appears in a house’s doorway are unfamiliar to the series.

However, Cregger has since explained that the upcoming movie is not adapting the Resident Evil games’ story and characters, or even their lore, necessarily. Instead, this movie’s ambition is to adapt the shared gameplay experience of these survival horror games, which is something that a recently released horror movie inadvertently achieved for a different franchise. Despite not being an adaptation at all, this new Damien McCarthy movie so happens to be the best adaptation of the Silent Hill games that we’ve ever received.

Hokum Is Basically An Honorary Silent Hill Story

Damien McCarthy’s Hokum isn’t a Silent Hill adaptation, but it’s easy to find narrative and mechanical parallels between it and many Silent Hill games. This is particularly true of the entries that dabble more into protagonists’ psyches, rather than the ones that are mired in occult lore. Hokum’s protagonist, Ohm Bauman, would not be out of place in a Silent Hill game, as his deeply personal trauma is obscured until much later, and the author’s overwhelming guilt is represented thematically via a suicide attempt and a heavy-handed depiction of his conquistador story.

Ireland’s Bilberry Woods Hotel would make a fine addition to Silent Hill’s long list of iconic, haunting landmarks, with the hotel’s honeymoon suite, in particular, being a fantastic hotbed for supernatural occurrences and psychological horror. Locked inside with seemingly no way out, Ohm must explore the suite and solve creative environmental puzzles. This perfectly translates a staple of the Silent Hill games, with players turning every doorknob to see which ways are accessible and which aren’t, marking their maps as they go, and deducing riddles in order to obtain key items needed elsewhere.

Hokum Demonstrates How Resident Evil Can Succeed

Silent Hill and Resident Evil are in the same boat regarding their movie adaptations being largely lackluster, much less failing to faithfully represent their respective source material. Ironically, Hokum being a better Silent Hill movie adaptation than any of the legitimate adaptation attempts that precede it bodes well for Cregger’s Resident Evil movie. If its focus is the gameplay experience, and not merely iconography or popular character cameos, it could be equally terrific as an adaptation.

Fans might be pleased to see the movie’s protagonist, Bryan, come across Leon S. Kennedy, but Cregger would be right to avoid soulless fan service. If Hokum can appear to be a Silent Hill movie, with all its originality, then Resident Evil surely can, and we already know that the movie will have its own references to the games, such as Resident Evil’s potted herb Easter egg.

Resident Evil lacks the psychological and emotional storytelling that comes naturally to a harrowing Silent Hill narrative. That said, Resident Evil can allow itself to be considerably more campy and lean on comparable gameplay experiences, including the mismanagement of limited resources and having to solve convoluted puzzles to traverse absurd and grandiose set-pieces.

Plus, Resident Evil’s action-packed gameplay gives Cregger’s movie an opportunity for Bryan to combat whatever gruesome bioweapon creatures he encounters. Meanwhile, combat being so unsatisfying and secondary in most Silent Hill games is proof that future Silent Hill movie adaptations should probably stick to terrifying imagery and solemn themes, and Hokum is now a phenomenal template for what that could look like.

Resident Evil is scheduled to be released in theaters on September 18, 2026.

Release Date

September 18, 2026

Director

Zach Cregger

Writers

Shay Hatten, Zach Cregger