Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Resident Evil Village, including minor story spoilers.
Dutch director Richard Raaphorst has accused Capcom of stealing monster designs from his film Frankenstein’s Army for Resident Evil Village.
In a LinkedIn post by Raaphorst, he explains how his 2013 film features a humanoid monster with a head resembling an aeroplane propeller and turbine, and was seemingly copies for Resident Evil Village. “It’s a crazy monster movie filled with my own creature designs, one of which has been used – completely without authorization or credit in the newest Resident Evil game.”
A create similar to this appears in Resident Evil Village; with the propeller blades made from chainsaws but no human arms. However, both this and the monster from Frankenstein’s Army catch fire.
You can find comparison images by Raaphorst below.
Twitch streamer CloneKorp found other examples, and posted them in a thread on Twitter. Along with the propeller headed creature, Frankenstein’s Army features a creature with scissor-like hands and a hammer-head style helmet, a creature with jagged blade arms and a diver’s helmet, and an almost human creature with robotic right arm and a pipe coming out of its head.
CloneKorp compares these to other mechanical creatures within Village. In order, this includes a creature with drill arms and slabs of metal making a bull-like head, a creature almost entirely covered in metal plates with multiple drills on its arms and a bulky spherical head, and a zombie with a drill on its left arm and machine parts over its eyes.
You can find all the comparisons below (Frankenstein’s Army on the left, Resident Evil Village on the right).
While CloneKorp admits to another Twitter user that “The rest although not as identical as the first, [but] also carry similar traits,” Raaphorst seemingly found the comparisons more direct. “Oh dude, this is worse then I thought,” he replied to CloneKorp. “First I felt angry, then proud, but now I see this, I feel sad.”
While it is worth noting both the plot of Frankenstein’s Army and those enemies within Resident Evil Village are born of “mad scientists” grafting machine parts onto corpses, Raaphorst has not claimed any plot elements as being lifted. It may be the concept is considered a trope; an idea so widely used for so long that it cannot be rightly owned by anyone.
In 2018, Dutch horror film news website Schokkend Nieuws accused J.J. Abrams’ Overlord of copying the plot of Frankenstein’s Army. “Maybe it’s obvious,” Raaphorst told Schokkend Nieuws. “It could also just be the zeitgeist.”
However, Raaphorst explained that when working on a reboot of the film, deals with a screenplay writer broke down when he asked for changes. Raaphorst had provided some storyboard sketches, which bares comparison to Overlord‘s redband trailer, including a corpse or other horrific being inside a bag.
We shall keep you informed as we learn more. In other recent news, Resident Evil Village sold over 3 million copies.
Resident Evil Village launches May 7th on Windows PC (via Steam), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Google Stadia. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will support upgrades to the next generation. In case you missed it, you can find our hands-on preview with the game’s demo here, and can expect our full review soon.
