Not what we expected at all: you know Chandler Riggs, the actor famed for portraying Carl, Rick Grimes’s (annoying) son in The Walking Dead? Well, it turns out he’s an ardent fan of Resident Evil and has decided to write, direct, and star in a horror short inspired by the series. And what a horror it is! We were genuinely impressed by his talents. The short film is titled Biohazard; in the cast with Riggs is another former The Walking Dead star, who used to play Tobin, Jason Douglas, taking on the antagonist role, and the impressive practical effects are by the renowned Greg Nicotero. Not bad for an amateur project. After watching it, even though it’s not exactly the case since the film has only just been released but the concept predates Cregger’s version, it seems almost as if Riggs is positioning himself as the lead in the next film of the series and that he already has a full story in mind, given that the short ends at “the height of the moment.” The film also includes an homage to Don’t Open That Door, which demonstrates the actor’s passion for the horror genre. If you’ve got a strong stomach and want to see it, you’ll find it below.
Biohazard: the plot and what Chandler Riggs says
As we’ve seen, Riggs plays Ethan Winters, who, while searching for his wife Mia, finds himself trapped by an infected family led by Jack Baker, played by Douglas (the other actors are Mary Rachel Quinn, Eugenie Bondurant, Jonathan O’Neil, and Sam Coyles). Escaping that hallucinatory situation will be harder than expected. The timing with Cregger’s film was, according to Riggs, a coincidence: “We were in preproduction when an article came out saying Zach Cregger would make the film, and I said ‘oh my God, we need to release ours first’. We tried to speed everything up and have it out about a month ago, but things didn’t go as planned.” His desire to make the film, he said, was to “see a faithful live-action adaptation of Resident Evil that stays true to the game.” The actor then describes wrestling with the viewpoint and whether it could be possible to drop the third-person perspective and shoot everything in first person: “We aim to be super faithful to the game, but this perspective is an important aspect from which we diverge. But there isn’t another nice way to tell the story in a live-action format. I thought about it time and time again to see if we could do it entirely in first-person, avoiding seeing his face or anything. But the more we thought about it, the more I realized that it was the right move to make and to speak to a broader audience than just the players. And so we broke those rules. It’s something that intimidated me, and I hope people will be okay with it.”
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