I remember being nine years old in 1996, sitting in the dark with my brother, and loading Resident Evil into the PlayStation. At that point in my young life, I was perfectly okay with just watching and not playing. I vividly recall the hairs on the back of my neck standing up as members of S.T.A.R.S. were picked off while running through the long grass outside the mansion. I remember us both jumping as zombie dogs burst through the windows of the mansion, not knowing what would pop up when the screen faded to black, room to room.
It was here that my love for the Resident Evil game series blossomed, and to this day, I still buy almost every game released in the beloved franchise. Since then, Resident Evil has spawned seven live-action films, four animated films, and a recent Netflix series, all alongside its massive game catalog. But where did the idea for Resident Evil come from? The answer is that it was inspired by an ’80s horror film titled Sweet Home.
Sweet Home is a 1989 Japanese horror flick written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and distributed by Toho. The movie follows a small film crew that visits an old, abandoned, and decrepit mansion in hopes of restoring the art of its previous owner, Ichirō Mamiya, to film a documentary. After arriving at the mansion, the group encounters hauntings by the ghost of the late artist’s wife. While she was alive, her child crawled into an open furnace, and after her death, she haunts and murders anyone who comes to the mansion out of anger at her negligence.
The movie is great, offering amazingly stylized lighting, a fantastic score, and a slow burn for the first hour that ramps things up for an incredibly wild third act filled with tons of gore and excellent practical effects. But on its surface, it feels much more in line with Poltergeist than with something like Night of the Living Dead. However, even from the beginning, you can see where the aesthetic inspired Capcom.
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A giant, secluded, and condemned mansion, surrounded by fog and long grass; ripped-apart bodies moaning and crawling across the floor; and even an “evolved” version of a mutated-looking monster to cap off the film’s climax. All things that now wouldn’t necessarily feel normal in a ghost story but are absolutely essential for a Resident Evil story.
The same year, Capcom developed and released a video game adaptation of Sweet Home. Only available in Japan, the game was released for the NES (Famicom) and helped give birth to the horror survival gaming genre. Much like the 1987 NES release Maniac Mansion, the game involved a group of five characters, each with their own strengths and attributes, who had to take on the ghost of Lady Mamiya and all sorts of other hellish creatures roaming the mansion. If all five characters die, you lose the game. Though Sweet Home was more of an RPG at its core, many aspects of the original game were amplified and reused as Capcom began developing Resident Evil.
The first and most obvious example is the old mansion, an environment that is almost its own character in the first Resident Evil game. Other, smaller inspirations were grouped together and brought into Resident Evil and are still major elements of the games today. For instance, the puzzles that need to be solved to progress through the game, the entire inventory management system (including filling up boxes and having extra cases), and even the fade-out of doors opening and closing when moving from room to room. Sweet Home also had random diaries that could be found, giving the player insight into side stories from before the game begins.
Unfortunately, Sweet Home went a little too brutal, using a slide projector to advance the backstory and showing horrific images that were also used in the film. This actually prevented the Sweet Home game from being released in the United States. Capcom knew they had something special, so they turned their own ideas into the biggest horror franchise in gaming history.
If you want to check out such an important piece of gaming and horror history, I recommend watching the movie. Unfortunately, it can be hard to find, but there’s a full version available on YouTube. I recommend skipping to the 1:06 mark, as the stream opens with a full NES game trailer (posted below) that includes spoilers from the movie. However, I totally suggest going back and watching the trailer after the movie. It’s always amazing to see where the things we love come from. Enjoy!
