The Resident Evil series is celebrating its 30-year anniversary today, March 22, 2025. Below, we look at the way the series subversively blends thirst traps with horrific thrills.
Leon Kennedy is tied up. The henchmen of cult leader Osmund Saddler have injected him with Las Plagas–an ancient, zombifying parasite. His hands are cuffed to a chain, at the other end of which is Kennedy’s sometimes-ally Luis Sera. They work together to get free. There is a rhythm between them as they pull on the chain. Their muscles are taut, they trade grunts like drumbeats. For now, their bodies are triumphant. Yet, in just a few short hours, Luis will be dead and Leon will be coughing up blood, while Las Plagas takes more and more hold of him. This is just one moment across Resident Evil’s 30-year history, but it is far from a unique one. The franchise puts its stars in constant peril. Because that peril is so fixated on the body and its permeability, it often has an erotic dimension. It’s easy to limit this to the games’ casts of femme fatales and women-in-peril, but it is the men, especially Leon Kennedy, who bear the brunt of it in practice. One of the series’ sincere pleasures is watching beautiful people, but especially beautiful men, get hurt.
In part, this is a consequence of Resident Evil’s mechanical ideas. In most shooters and action games, the player cannot really get injured. The body of the Doomslayer, to take one example, is almost a pure machine, operating with total efficiency until the very moment of death. In Resident Evil, each and every hit has consequences. When Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine get hurt, they start to limp. Moving slower means it is more difficult to evade enemies, which means they might have to use more ammo to kill them. Best then, to take as few hits as possible. Their survival depends on vigilance. The body is something that can change, even if a few green herbs can patch it up. As the series morphed into almost pure action, it never lost this fixation.
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