Resident Evil Village: Death Cults And Pandemic Paranoia
Fans will know that bio weapon paranoia has always been at the heart of Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise. Much more than a zombie shoot ’em up, its writers have been cooking up military-industrial schemes to infect the global population for decades. Whether it’s parasites, viruses or vaccines with unintended consequences unleashed on the local water supply, ‘Biohazard’ as the franchise is known in Japan is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. With its latest iteration being developed during the pandemic however, the content hit closer to home, giving a whole new meaning to ‘survival horror’.
Ethan Winters – Dead on Arrival?
After the events of Resident Evil 7, main character Ethan Winters is secreted away to a remote Eastern European village with his wife Mia and baby Rose. Everything is not as it seems though, and it turns out village cult leader/evil scientist Mother Miranda has been shapeshifting as Mia in a bid to steal baby Rose. Her plan is to use Rose to resurrect her daughter Eva, who died in the 1918 flu pandemic.
We also find out the village is overshadowed by four lords – giant vampire lady Dimitrescu, hideous swamp creature Moreau, crazy doll lady Beneviento and robot factory owner Heisenberg. If this all sounds like a mixed up fever dream, that could be because this is all taking place in Ethan’s mind, after he died at the end of RE7 – or did he? This is an ongoing question throughout the game, and it’s up to the player to work it out.
While most of the hype seems to have fixated on the towering vampire lady Dimitrescu, the game features some of the most beautifully rendered environments in the series to date, and I would argue one of its most intriguing villains in Mother Miranda.
Mother Miranda – Angel of Death
Miranda has one of the most fascinating back stories of any Resident Evil character, and one of the most striking designs. A scientist who lost her only daughter during the 1918 pandemic, she discovered a large fungal colony beneath her village and became infected by the mould. She found the so-called ‘Black God’ could store and copy the consciousness of the deceased and became obsessed with the idea of reviving her dead daughter. Her infection gives her powers such as shapeshifting and mind control, and she converts the villagers (probably from Christianity) to follow her pagan death cult. Through her experiments she commits genocide on the entire local population.
Her character design is full of symbolism relating to her worship of the Black God. Her wings make her look like a dark angel, and her mask is reminiscent of a plague doctor’s with its long, beak-like protrusion. Capcom designers said they wanted her to look like a crow, which is often used as a symbol of death and horror. Birds have been seen as messengers of God since antiquity, and it’s fitting that the messenger of the Black God would represent a carrion eater. She also wears a sort of halo featuring a staring eye, which references some of the terrifying descriptions of angels found in the bible. In a perversion of the Holy Virgin icons of Christianity, images around the village show her holding a baby in the same pose.
Fans have also noted similarities to the mask Jennifer Lopez wears in The Cell, designed by Eiko Ishioka. Her stunningly intricate designs can also be found in another iconic horror title – Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula.
A Fairy Tale Ending?
Resident Evil Village’s preoccupation with death, decay, fungus, and whether consciousness can continue beyond corporeal death is hardly surprising given the timing of the game’s development. Perhaps one of the most frightening takeaways is the reminder of the real-world threat posed by fungus and mycotoxins. These have the potential to be used as bioweapons and in the 1980’s the US accused the Soviet Union of using the T-2 mycotoxin (found in mouldy grain) as a chemical weapon. Even more worryingly, studies have now found that COVID-19 can make us more susceptible to a variety of fungal infections, due to immune system dysregulation.
While Village’s focus on black mould may be timely, some of its messages are more problematic, especially when delivered in the middle of a pandemic. We find out throughout the game that Miranda has been experimenting on the villagers, in order to find the perfect host for the resurrection of her daughter. We know all of these experiments were disastrous, with many villagers turning into monstrous werewolf type ‘lycans,’ which went on to desecrate the rest of the village. Hidden at the very end of the game however, as the credits roll, this story is told in a slightly different, and more concerning, way.
The yellowed pages of an old book illustrate the pandemic striking the village in 1918. A mother falls sick and is buried in the churchyard, and soon after her daughter gets sick too. A villager points up the hill to the local church, and the worried father takes his daughter. Miranda presides over the scene, as a plague doctor administers a vaccine to the residents. While the daughter is cured, her father soon transforms into a monstrous lycan, and we know what happens to the village after that.
Yes, the franchise has focused on vaccines going wrong or being used for nefarious ends in the past, but to see it spelled out in this way, at a time when people were being encouraged to get vaccinated is pretty subversive. With reports that the Covid virus was developed in a lab, conspiracy theories that it was a ‘plandemic’ will only multiply. Maybe this is one Easter egg that Capcom should have kept hidden.
