Resident Evil Village: About the Baby
Horror Game Channels Rival Series Silent Hill in its Most Horrifying Sequence
SPOILER WARNING for Capcom’s Resident Evil Village from here on:
Resident Evil Village: I’ll admit here that I call it RE8, though people seem to agree it should just be called what it says; numbered entries are so outdated. Capcom’s quarter-century-old video game series is doing things differently with its latest installment in a lot of ways, starting with its title. In another critical difference from installments past, the game ostensibly features traditional Gothic literary monsters rather than RE’s traditional quasi-Sci-Fi zombies and B-movie mutants. And in its scariest sequence by far, Village throws another curveball by drawing influence from RE’s eternal bookend, Konami’s Silent Hill, for a scene driven by psychological horror that contends for the series’ most disturbing ever.
The second boss villain in the gauntlet of antagonists that forms Village’s structure is the spooky Donna Beneviento, a classic Gothic ‘Woman in Black’ with a tragic life story who lives as a spinster in a foggy haunted house, alone, save for the hundreds of unnerving dolls. There’s something “Rose for Emily” about her. The start of her section is spooky in that same traditional Gothic fashion: the approach to House Beneviento is all foggy cemeteries and rope bridges floating in mist. The house itself looks like a classic haunted house. Spooky, sure, but not necessarily scary. The second half of Beneviento’s section, however, takes a gut-wrenching turn into bloody, Silent Hill-esque psychological-sexual horror.
When player/protagonist Ethan Winters enters Beneviento’s house, he falls under the influence of psychotropic spores emitted by special flowers inside. It takes playing through Beneviento’s defeat and looking back in retrospect to understand that, but it is critical to understanding the full significance of the horror here. So, although neither you nor Ethan know it going in, Ethan is tripping balls once he’s a few meters into Beneviento’s territory (We get a big subtle clue towards this when Mia first appears to Ethan out of the mist, having been shot about twenty times in the opening scene).
Here, we have entered a place where Silent Hill-brand horror can take place. While Resident Evil enemies are almost always flesh-and-bone monsters that want to tear you apart and eat you — think Jaws or Alien — Silent Hill’s monsters are more of the mind, twisted nightmares usually manifested from the psychosexual issues of the main characters — think The Shining or the films of David Lynch. The world of RE is very much Science-Run-Amok, with little psychological analysis invited, but Beneviento’s hallucinogenic flowers offer a scientifically plausible excuse for Ethan to go down a rabbit hole to Psychological Horror Hell (actually, it’s an Inception elevator, which is even better).
So we’re in a psychological nightmare-realm informed by Ethan’s deepest, darkest fears, a hell tailored to his psyche. What does that entail? What’s on Ethan’s mind? is the question. For answers, we can look at what the story has provided us in terms of Ethan’s character. The game’s opening sees us playing as Ethan at home, where we are allowed a look into the Winterses’ domestic life. Since we left Ethan and Mia in Resident Evil 7, they’ve resumed their storybook marriage and even had a baby, Rosemary, usually just Rose. Rose is clearly the light of Mommy and Daddy’s lives: the Winters home is filled with baby toys, kids’ books, family photos and scrapbooks commemorating baby Rose and Mia’s pregnancy, called a “miracle” by Ethan at one point. Ethan, Mia, and now Rose seem to have just the perfect family life; that is, until we look closer and begin to notice some details that seem a bit strange. Rose’s birth certificate tells us that she was born at nearly fifteen pounds, and that the B.S.A.A. has done additional tests on her with regard to the Mold that infected both of her parents’ bodies in the last game. We read a page of Ethan’s journal, where he describes Mia “blowing up at the hospital.” We also know that there is a secret between Ethan and his wife that Mia simply refuses to talk about, and we begin to wonder how those tests came back…
This being Resident Evil, it comes as zero surprise when we inevitably learn that Rose Winters was born with Mold powers far surpassing those of both her parents together — Ethan and Mia might have inadvertently created the perfect bioweapon. For the sake of the story, though, Ethan seems largely oblivious to the idea that Rose might be anything but an ordinary six-month-old until late in the game, and we accept it.
Under the influence of Beneviento’s pollen, Ethan is in a sort of twisted dollmaker’s surgical theater. On the slab is an unnerving life-size wooden doll that looks a lot like Mia, along with a Polaroid of Mia’s bloody corpse if the message wasn’t clear enough. Next door is an old-fashioned sort of hospital room that makes us feel sterile and nervous. Intermittent broadcasts come in on an old radio, all seemingly from Mia beyond the grave: remarking on Rose’s strong kicks in her belly; frantically telling herself that everything will be fine; cryptically referring to a secret again. In the hall is a stylized painting of a pregnant woman that, when we pass it, falls and hangs by one string so that the figure appears to hang by the neck. Here, in the basement of Ethan’s psyche, we are being reminded that Mia bore an unusually strong child, that Mia and Ethan never spoke of some secret about that child, that something bad happened at the hospital. Mia had a baby, and now she’s dead.
At the terrible crescendo, we find ourselves at the bottom of a well, picking up a key that we need; somewhere above comes a crash… and the sound of a baby crying. Climbing back up, the surgical theater is lit with red, like the hallways of the Nostromo. We find the operating table covered in blood, the Mia doll in pieces on the floor, and from her remains a long, glistening pink cord extends down the hall into the darkness…
Following the bloody umbilical cord down the winding hallway, we all but know what we are about to see at this point, but it still comes as a shock when the biggest, bloodiest, most horrifically deformed fetus from hell you hoped you’d never meet lumbers out of the darkness and cries for its daddy, being you. At this point, you don’t remember that Ethan exists: you want to get away from that god-awful monster baby, as if after catching and swallowing Ethan (look up the video, or don’t), it might crawl through the screen The Ring-style and swallow you, controller and all. Twisting the knife, Capcom includes a diabolical gameplay mechanic in which the player must flee and hide under a bed, weaponless and emasculated in the face of the horrific baby. From our breathless hiding spot under the bed, we think can empathize with Ethan’s horror, and the meaning sinks in: this is Ethan’s baby. This is Rose. Not the real Rose, but the Rose of the depths of Ethan’s subconscious, grotesque, red, and gluttonous.
Regardless of Ethan’s love for his daughter — arguably the main driving power behind Village’s story — she is still a bioweapon of untold power, a dark cloud that came over his family, drove them apart, and led to his wife’s death; a monster, ostensibly. The knowledge of what Rose probably is and is capable of is subconscious fear that Ethan carries into Donna Beneviento’s haunted mind-fuck palace; they are the threads the dark spinster weaves into a private nightmare for him. That’s what the whole sequence amounts to: a big, bloody mind-fuck level in the best traditions of Silent Hill, with horror that only sinks in after you’ve finished the story and thought about what you’ve seen. It’s a huge curveball for Resident Evil to throw, being the eternal antithesis to Konami’s series. Art influences art, though, and paying homage to its sister-series was a great move for Resident Evil here, reaffirming that Survival Horror’s oldest giant is still the master of terrifying players by finding new ways to surprise them. Like Ethan’s existential dread at what Rose could grow up into, the things that scare us the most are questions of the unknown. Resident Evil Village unnerves us in this way by thrusting the player into unknown territory. Coming off of my first playthrough, I had a few dozen questions about what I’d just witnessed, but there was one thing I knew for sure: that for as long as I live, whenever I play RE8, I’m going to dread that goddamn baby cooing “Yummy!” as it shoves Ethan down its gullet.
