Resident Evil 4 Remake Is a Love(craftian) Letter to My Favorite Monsters

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There are a lot of reasons to love Resident Evil 4, but something that jumped out at me while playing through the remake is how it feels like a medley of homages to some of the greatest horror movie monsters and antagonists of all time. There’s no way of telling how many of these actually are deliberate nods to other fiction, and how much it’s my own brain jumping to conclusions, but it’s still fun to dissect the many weird parts that make up this masterpiece of a game.

It’s pretty safe to say The chainsaw-wielding burlap sack-wearing Dr. Salvador takes some inspiration from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and quite possibly Jason Voorhees’ baggier, less athletic look from Friday The 13th Part 2. Del Lago might be more salamander than shark, but that whole boss fight would be right at home in the third act of a Jaws movie. The lumbering El Gigante bears a striking resemblance to the cave troll in The Fellowship of the Ring. This seems even more apparent in the remake, as the later El Gigante encounters have the giants wearing armor that would absolutely fit the dress code of Sauron’s ranks. That one might not seem quite like an iconic movie monster, but bear in mind the Lord of the Rings movies were on everyone’s minds around the time RE4 was in development.

Las Plagas, the parasites that act as the connective tissue of Resident Evil 4’s menagerie of monsters, look like distant cousins of the face-hugging larvae made famous in Alien. We see the Plagas genetically engineered into all sorts of critters throughout the game, but a couple of them are especially Xenomorphian. The insectoid nature and hive-based society of the Navistadors mimic the bugs in Aliens, but there’s also the sleek, black, whip-tailed Verdugo,