Austin Abrams Makes an Important Discovery in New ‘Resident Evil’ Clip

With less than a month to go before the release of Weapons writer and director Zach Cregger’s big-screen Resident Evil adaptation, the film’s marketing is kicking into high gear. Sony released a whole three-minute scene from the film, and it’s got a little bit of everything: action, blood, humor, and a vital piece of information for Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who finds himself trapped in Raccoon City with a whole lot of zombies. The clip shows Bryan running through a gauntlet of falling zombies as the creatures throw themselves from the roofs of some tall buildings. Once he reaches the end, he looks over the carnage and says, “You guys are not coming back? You can die.” If that’s not something he knew before, it certainly seems like good information to have. Cregger talked about this scene (or, at least, we assume it’s this scene, unless there’s more than one sequence in which Abrams dodges a bunch of falling zombie bodies, which, to be fair, is entirely possible) during Collider’s Directors on Directing panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2026. When asked about the most difficult scene of his career, Cregger said, “[Austin is] running and [the bodies are] just detonating all around him, and it’s this really long gauntlet of leaping over cars and bodies exploding. And I didn’t want to do it with VFX. I’m not afraid to use them, but I wanted to do as many practical detonations as possible, because that was gonna make it look tangible and real.” “So what we did is we had to set up all these frames and string all these 150-pound human sacks that were loaded with liquid blood and dress the street with snow and get the timing right,” he continued. “All these things had to happen together. Austin had to run at a consistent speed. We had to have a camera truck follow him really close. If he’d tripped, they would have run him over and killed him. And we had to time the dropping of these bodies, which are, like, six stories up—that is a long drop—and these things are 150 pounds, and they’re landing next to him and exploding.” According to Cregger, there were some big risks involved in doing this stunt practically. “Hopefully, they don’t kill my star, which one of them dropped too soon, and it’s in the movie; it goes, like, an inch from his head,” he explained. “If he’d been an inch to the right, he would have definitely died. But I think it paid off. It’s awesome.” It’s true that the scene does look fantastic, and the practical effects definitely paid off, but damn—poor Abrams, right? Between this and being swallowed by a whale in Whalefall, dude can’t catch a break. We’ll see what other horrifying situations he had to endure when Resident Evil opens in theaters on September 18. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.