Collab - Resident Evil Shooting Day

- september 27, 2021

1996 Was a very good year for videogames.
Production of the Playstation 1 was going through the roof. Nintendo countered with the Nintendo 64.
Duke Nukem 3D, Super Mario 64. Tekken 2 and Donkey Kong Country 3 became legends. Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Command and Conquer, Quake, Pokémon, Dead or Alive, Star Ocean and Resident Evil all debuted.

For me the survival horror of Resident Evil was something new. A different atmosphere than zombie-shooters like Doom or Wolfenstein and even more addictive. Luckily in 1996 I was working in the videogames industry .. so playing all night could even happen at the office.

Not even Parasite Eve, Silent Hill, Nightmare Creatures, Bioshock, Deep space, The Last of Us, The Evil Within, .. grapped me like that first night of Resident Evil.. that first time of being a vulnerable human in a world of zombies.

And yes then there were the sequels, and the movies, and the novels & comics and the animated series and the remakes. (Full list)

Fast forward to a few weeks back when I stumbled by accident upon the results of a shoot by the Belgian Resident Evil Cosplay Team and got invited for their next get-together. "Would you like to make some photos?" they ask. Obviously I want to make some RE-horror pictures.. like DUH! And besides the timing is brilliant: the spooky season is almost upon us.

Imagining a shoot with max 3 or 4 cosplayers (and hopefully a zombie) I had prepared ideas for 4 different pictures (which is 2 more than for any other shoot). On a Sunday morning my girlfriend-slash-trusted-light-and-smoke-assistant and myself arrive at the abandoned fortress and immediately spot the expected 4 cosplayers. But then more arrive.. and more.. and zombies. Suddenly I'm facing an army of 12 Resident Evil zombie-slayers from Belgium, Germany and France.. with zombies and a Raccoon City police car.

8 hours later there were no survivors. And in the following weeks the photographic evidence of this epic battle between the living and the dead will be posted on Flickr.