From Zach Cregger's recent hit Resident Evil movie, to the smashing success of the Resident Evil Requiem video game and announcement of next year's Resident Evil: Code Veronica remake, Capcom's long-running horror franchise is riding high in 2026. And now, barely a month out from the release of Cregger's acclaimed adaptation, Resident Evil has just received its next boost in the form of Chandler Rigg's Biohazard fan film.
Riggs is best known for his eight-season stint on AMC's The Walking Dead, where he played Carl Grimes. The actor was only 10 years old when he filmed the show's first season, so longtime viewers essentially watched him grow up over the course of the series, until Carl's heartwrenching demise late in the show. It should come as no surprise that this experience instilled a love of horror in Riggs, which paved the way for his most recent project: a live-action fan film adaptation of Resident Evil 7, titled Biohazard, after the original Japanese title for the series as well as RE7's American subtitle.
Fan films can be a total coin toss in terms of quality, but it's extremely refreshing to say that Rigg's take on Resident Evil 7 is a blast. The 19-minute short film may lack the production values of a true big budget adaptation, but it more than makes up for it by bleeding love and horror out of every frame.
Chandler Riggs' Resident Evil movie left me wanting more
The most notable thing about the Biohazard fan film is just how faithful it is to the game it's based on. Resident Evil 7 served as something of a soft reboot for the video game series, utilizing a first-person camera for the first time in the franchise's history and following a brand new protagonist named Ethan Winters, who is trapped in a Louisiana farmhouse with the demented and seemingly indestructible Baker family after he goes searching for his missing wife, Mia. The Bakers are terrifying and memorable antagonists, especially the patriarch Jack, who chases Ethan through the labyrinthine house with manic zeal.
Riggs' film adapts part of the opening section of the game, including the introduction of the Bakers and Ethan's first desperate attempts to get away from Jack. Some events are shuffled slightly, but just about everything in the movie is ripped directly from Resident Evil 7, from dialogue to blocking to the ridiculously faithful sets. It's the closest thing you can come to watching part of one of the Resident Evil games in a live-action movie.
Every previous live-action adaptation of Resident Evil flirted with faithfulness to the source material to varying degrees. Paul W.S. Anderson's six-film run starring Milla Jovovich drew large plot beats and iconic characters from the games, but largely sidelined them in favor of an original post-apocalypse story that hyper-fixated on Jovovich's superpowered hero, Alice. Johannes Roberts' Welcome to Raccoon City tried to adapt the first two video games into one two-hour movie, and while it was often compelling visually, it lost much of the coherence of the narrative in order to shoehorn in references that often missed the mark. Netflix's Resident Evil television show, which was canceled after one season, tried to function as an sequel set in the same universe as the video games, but ultimately failed to land so hard that not even the ever-incredible Lance Reddick could save it with his dynamic performance as the franchise's most recognizable villain, Albert Wesker.
Chandler Riggs and Zach Cregger took polar opposite approaches to Resident Evil
That brings us to 2026, where we finally got two Resident Evil movies that are each far more faithful in their own way. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil released in mid-September and has since become both the highest-grossing film in the franchise as well as the highest-grossing of the writer-director's career thus far. It follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who is unwittingly sent on a delivery into the heart of Raccoon City during the deadly outbreak that leads to its destruction. Cregger's take on the franchise jettisoned the often complicated plotlines from the games, instead focusing wholly on Brian's personal story while recreating the vibe and functionality that one experiences when playing a Resident Evil video game.
What's fascinating about Riggs' fan film is that it essentially takes the exact opposite approach of Zach Cregger's movie. While Cregger decided to sidestep the responsibility of faithfully recreating one of the games, Riggs attacked the challenge with obvious devotion. The Walking Dead star is a great fit for the role of Ethan Winters, while his fellow TWD co-star Jason Douglas does a bang-up job inhabiting the outrageous relentlessness of Jack Baker. It is essentially a carbon copy of what exists in Resident Evil 7, but in movie form. Cregger sought to put his own stamp on the franchise; Riggs aimed to recreate what already existed as well as possible.
By having these two competing visions for what a Resident Evil movie can look like come out so close together, it makes for an intriguing case study for the pros and cons to each approach. While I loved Cregger's Resident Evil movie, I was left wishing it treated the overall bioweapon plague part of its storyline with a bit more seriousness, rather than the butt of a joke to be referenced for a handful of seconds in order to get back to the survival story at hand. This made the movie extremely accessible to people who aren't familiar with Resident Evil's often convoluted lore, but it did come at the cost of losing part of what makes the game stories so worthwhile.
‘Biohazard’ (2026) - dir. Chandler Riggs pic.twitter.com/MDrR0Fwyg0
— lunis🌙 (@lunsij) October 17, 2026
Riggs' Biohazard fan film veers so hard in the opposite direction that it's actually somewhat hard to recommend to people who aren't already familiar with Resident Evil 7. It hints at the story of the game, but most of the actual plot points don't make it into the film. Instead, we get a large focus on action setpieces as Ethan goes through his first terrifying encounters with the Bakers, including an iconic garage fight scene with Jack. There's no real resolution to the movie, and not much plot development beyond Ethan being trapped in the house and realizing something is very, very wrong with his body as he survives encounters that should kill him. If you don't already have a good idea of what's going on from the game, it's borderline incoherent.
Granted, much of the reason for those issues with Biohazard's story are clearly tied to its smaller budget and scope as a fan film rather than a full-blown Hollywood production. If Riggs were able to adapt the entirety of Resident Evil 7, I have no doubt things like a mysterious voice on the phone at the end of the film would make more sense, rather than serve as a cute nod to fans that Ethan has essentially hit his first save point before we cut to credits. But still, it's easy to see how the film's cracks might expand into a larger scale project.
As a proof of concept, however, I think Riggs' Biohazard movie is a resounding success. Part of why Zach Cregger's movie was so well-received is because, after numerous attempts to adapt the admittedly gonzo story elements from the Resident Evil video games with varying degress of success, a filmmaker found a totally new avenue into the series that didn't require any prior knowledge or suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. The decision to steer hard away from the games was intentional, as Cregger told IGN at San Diego Comic Con:
"I am not trying to adapt a video game. I'm not using the characters from the games. I'm not telling a story that the games tell because I'm not going to be able to do it better than the games. The games are so well executed, and to me, Leon and Claire and these characters, they exist so perfectly in the games that anyone I cast and any difference that I do with them would be, probably, to the detriment of what I was trying to do."
Riggs, on the other hand, was obviously trying to adapt a video game. And really, his movie kind of makes Cregger's point. For as cool as this fan film is, it is not better than what we got in Resident Evil 7. It is simply a faithful, strongly-made reflection of that material in a new medium. But what it does succeed at so well is showing that a Resident Evil adaptation that seeks to recreate one of the games' stories is possible, with the right creative team behind it who care enough about the source material.
I hope that Capcom and Hollywood studios take notice. Between Riggs' Biohazard and Cregger's Resident Evil, there are more options than ever for gaming's original survival horror franchise to expand its big screen future.
Chandler Rigg's Biohazard fan film is available to watch for free on YouTube. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil releases digitally to rent or buy on November 3.
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