The Hunt for Horror in Resident Evil Franchise: Games versus Movies
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The chapter focuses on the formal differences between the two narratives of Resident Evil, the survival horror game series and the movies, aiming to analyse the difficulty of transition from a more generous expressive medium (the video game) to a much more restrictive one in terms of immersion and user interface (the movie). The game series and the movies share the same stories: common character names, common structure of the plot with only a little difference regarding the endings and the actions, but despite the use of the same tropes in both mediums, we have essentially two different cultural types of artefacts. The mechanism of horror (creating, maintaining and resolving the horrific tension) will be analysed in both cases with special attention to the Rhetorics of emotions correlated with the genre, defined not only by story, plot, images or music, but mostly by the strategy of narrative rhythm. We will show that the most important part in the horror genre is the rhythm built by opposite categories, through a constant alternation of text, sound and image with the unspoken, the silence and the invisible. The game will serve as an illustrative example for the Rhetorics of silence that builds the specific tension of horror. Comparatively, Resident Evil movies might be spectacular in terms of fantastic imagery, super-hero plot and special effects, but lack the moments of visual and narrative indeterminacy so closely related to the fear of the unknown. This work was possible with the financial support of the Sectoral Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/107/1.5/S/76841 with the title ‘Modern Doctoral Studies: Internationalization and Interdisciplinarity.’