Resident Evil reboot: Kaya Scodelario discusses ‘fast-moving, twitchy’ zombies

We’re only a couple weeks away from the November 24th theatrical release of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, writer/director Johannes Roberts‘ reboot of the Resident Evil movie franchise. We’ll get to see how effectively unnerving his version of the zombies are then, but I’m sure they won’t be as scary to any viewer as they were to Kaya Scodelario, who plays Claire Redfield in the film. Speaking with SFX magazine (as reported by MSN), Scodelario said,

There was a day where we were shooting a stunt and one of (the zombies) jumped on me. I thought it was just going to be the stunt guy before he had been through hair and makeup. He was actually already dressed up and I didn’t know. So he jumped at me, and I absolutely shit myself because it was so realistic. The contact lenses and blood in the mouth… They are very fast-moving. They are very twitchy. We really worked on keeping them as realistic to the game as possible, but also making sure that it worked in a cinematic universe. … We did as much practical makeup as possible, which is always really cool. They weren’t just green screen and computerized.”

Scodelario went on to explain that there were different stages of zombies on set, from preliminary zombies to the worst of the bunch, which were called the “walking dead”.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is directly based on the first two Resident Evil video games. Here’s the synopsis:

Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland… with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever… changed… and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.

Scodelario is joined in the cast by Avan Jogia as Leon Kennedy, Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield, Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine, Neal McDonough as William Birkin, Donal Logue as Chief Brian Irons, Chad Rook as Richard Aiken, Lily Gao as Ada Wong, Nathan Dale as Brad Vickers, and Marina Mazepa as Lisa Trevor. 

The Motion Picture Association has given Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City an R rating for strong violence and gore, and language throughout.