Scary Moments in Resident Evil 4

The Resident Evil series has become a bit of a controversy in recent years. RE6 met with mixed reception, and having watched a playthrough of the whole thing, I can see how it might pull more from Gears of War than it does classic Resident Evil. (Actually, the play-style of Gears of War was inspired by the over-the-shoulder setup of Resident Evil 4, so it's like coming full circle.) Many old RE fans are saying the series is losing its luster, and perhaps that's true. The genre is classified as "survival horror," but with plenty of resources and too few scares, neither of those words may be correct.
    In truth, the most I've played of Resident Evil has been half of 5, the demo of Revelations, and recently, all of Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. Yeah, I'm a late bloomer. Most of the PlayStation games we owned were the old crappy ones nobody knows about. Metal Gear Solid? Final Fantasy VII? No, say hello to Sorcerer's Maze and Roadsters. Never heard of them? I didn't think so.
    RE4 is the first full Resident Evil game I've played, and I've been impressed with it. One thing that struck me while playing is that, in spite of its more action-oriented approach, the game is still downright terrifying at parts. These moments didn't constitute the entire game, but they made me aware that RE games can still use action-based, intuitive control schemes and be scary.

    The point of this article is to cover what exactly scared me in RE4. Everybody's going to have scares in almost every game; I wrote an article on scary things in video games that weren't meant to be scary games. You can forget to kill a guy in RE4 and have him unexpectedly leap on you from behind, or turn around and come face-to-face with a harmless but intimidating stone gargoyle. These are unintentional scares, and what I'm referring to is when RE4 actually set its mind to it.

Introduction of the Novistadors. Admittedly, we are skipping to about halfway through the game here. Pretty much everything before this point could be summed up as "creepy" or "disturbing," but nothing genuinely scary.
    After finding Ashley, our two heroes take refuge in a nearby castle as the sun sets. This turns out to be a pretty dumb decision, as the castle is home to even worse horrors than the muttering parasite-bitten Spaniards Leon has dealt with before. He gets separated from Ashley, his connection to Hunnigan is cut off, and a high-pitched midget with a Napoleon complex calls in to annoy him from time to time. During one of these calls, said midget with a Napoleon complex, Ramon Salazar, tells Leon he's released his "pets" into the sewers. Funnily enough, Leon's next stop is the sewers.
    This was the first honestly scary part of the game for me. I could handle the woman with a pitchfork pinning her to the wall through her face and your cop buddy roasting on an open fire like a chestnut (it's Christmastime, everybody), but giant invisible bug/human monsters tend to get to me. You're expecting some new machination when you enter the sewers, but it's no biggie, right? After all, the Plagas were supposed to be a big deal, but you've been dispatching them left and right. Come on, Salazar! Bring on your stupid pets!
    The second this thought enters your mind, you hear something hit the water in front of you. You see absolutely nothing, but you hear something splash toward you rapidly. It turns out it was in an adjacent tunnel, but try telling that to my heart beating at double the normal speed.
    This sets the mood for an onslaught of invisible bug-people, the Novistadors. They become just as annoying as regular bugs later, but their introduction was the first actually frightening part of the game for me. You can't see them directly unless you damage them, so you have to go off of shifting light patterns and environmental interaction to locate them. They also take a good bit to bring down, and if you're low on health, expect instant decapitation without warning. And just when you think the sewer's all clear, you hear something else hit the water....
The Garradors. All the Garradors are unnerving, but the first one in particular conveys a scary tone. The only way to progress forward is by unlocking a door with a lever. The lever is inconveniently located by a large guy whose eyelids have been sewn shut. That may seem like a nice bonus, but it's taught him to rely on his hearing, which is useful when partnered with his huge steel claws. Make too much noise, and your head may wind up on the floor. Separated from your body, in case you couldn't tell what I was getting at.
    The Garrador doesn't exactly surprise you when you find it. It's locked to a wall in a cell, presenting the lever to you pretty obviously. You know it's probably going to bust out and try to murder you if you get too close, but there's no other option. You need to pull the lever. So you inch in closer, and closer, and closer...and then he busts out and tries to murder you. Go figure, right?
    This tactic forces you to get close to the thing you fear in order to initiate the battle. There is no standing off safely and shooting him to annoy him into breaking out early. You must stand right next to him to initiate the battle sequence, which is a perfect show of horror. The question is not if you can pull the lever without waking him. It's if you can run away fast enough when he wakes.
    The battle with each Garrador you find can be tense since they're so huge and ugly. Running may tip him off to your location, but walking may allow him to catch up to you and bump into you. Other encounters in the game throw narrow cells and other enemies into the mix, making each meeting a little different and a little harder.
Verdugo (Salazar's Right Hand). Ironically, Salazar's two personal bodyguards are polar opposites of the man himself. They're huge, he's tiny, they say nothing, he talks way too freaking much, they're ugly, he's...also ugly. Their stark differences can't help but draw attention to them, and you know you'll have to scrap with one eventually.
    That time comes when Leon ever-so-briefly catches up to Ashley after being separated from her and winds up plummeting down a trapdoor instead. Narrowly surviving impalement, he prepares for another unpleasant trip down the sewers. Salazar rings him up yet again to first tell him he's sent his "Right Hand" after Leon, then throws a temper tantrum like the twenty-year-old he is. (Napoleon complex, remember?) This "Right Hand," in case you couldn't tell, is one of Salazar's Verdugo bodyguards. Verdugo is apparently Spanish for "executioner." Sounds like a sociable man.
    It doesn't take long for the Verdugo to catch up to Leon, and stuff gets spooky then. You don't see anything for a long time (gee, brings up memories of our first voyage into the sewers), but you hear something burst open behind you when you enter a long, curving tunnel. From here on, you'll have to utilize quick-time events to avoid the Verdugo periodically attacking you from the shadows. The scary music, creepy gurgling, and general vagueness of what to expect increased my adrenaline and made me kind of fear what this thing looked like without the big red cloak.
    The Verdugo doesn't show itself until you turn on the power to the sewers and call up the elevator, which won't come until a whopping four minutes have passed. Until then, Captain Gurgles and his Tail of Morbid Fun will keep you occupied, forcing you to dodge around his fast attacks and...wait. Once again, you are locked into a narrow room with a big, menacing monster, and you have to wait for the door to even open back into the tunnel.
    The boss fight turns into more of a frantic run when you enter the tunnel, and it kind of makes me wish Resident Evil 4 had a sprint feature that let you run like you would in real life rather than trot steadily along. You can overturn tanks of liquid nitrogen to freeze the Verdugo, which will triple the damage you deal to it and give you some space to breathe, but considering you need either a ridiculously-overpowered weapon or a lot of ammo and patience to kill it, I would just run. Funnily enough, you don't have to kill the Verdugo; you just have to survive long enough to enter the elevator and wave goodbye to its Predator-wannabe face.
Oven Man. Alright, so not he's not completely scary, but he deserves an honorable mention, okay?
    After clearing the castle area, Leon moves onto an island to rescue Ashley (again) and defeat Saddler. I couldn't help but notice the island took a noticeable turn to resemble classic Resident Evil: more legitimate scares, less resources to go around. I love it. Leon eventually enters the island's facility, which is in disarray and certainly wouldn't pass a health inspection.
    Early on in this facility, you'll go through a bunch of rooms with chemicals and other weird supplies. While you slowly walk around the room, pondering what these are for, BAM! A guy on fire bursts from a nearby oven and lunges at you. If your reflexes aren't spot-on, he'll grab you and deal increased damage. 'Cause he's on fire. You will be too if you don't jam those buttons or waggle that Wii Remote.
    After all the creepy events you've gone through in the game, the Oven Man probably won't come off as the most terrifying part of RE4. There's not even a scary sound cue to accentuate his sudden appearance. He just throws off the door to the oven and decides he wants a hug. Actually, in that light, it's not so bad after all.
    But if you're absolutely not expecting him AND you catch him right in the middle of the screen, he can give you a decent thrill. I was always poking around on the side for more resources and only noticed him in my peripheral vision, so I think the effect was lessened. Heck, the first time, I blew his head off without thinking. The Oven Man has the capacity to be quite frightening, but probably less so than the other parts of the game.
    What was he doing in the oven, anyway? What if the last thing he said to his friends was, "Hey guys, check this out!" Perhaps he's just misunderstood.
Regeneradors. Who didn't think these would make the list? Honestly, who didn't?
    Regeneradors (apparently the Spanish spelling for "regenerators") are known to be some of the darn scariest things in the entire Resident Evil series, and for good reason. Your first encounter with one is deeper into the island facility, specifically in the medical area. Upon entering a room, you catch a glimpse of a big, dark, mutated body lying across an autopsy table in another room. You THINK you're supposed to enter the room, but the door to it is blocked off from the other side. Shrugging it off, you work your way into an adjacent room instead, which is equally as creepy with its Plagas-human assimilation procedure frozen in place.
    After acquiring a keycard, you hear the door to the room the mutated body was in fly off its hinges. You straighten up, aiming at your door, listening for the smallest detail. And then your door slides open, and some big, repulsive, disgusting thing lumbers toward you, hyperventilating and staring at you with those red eyes while its theme music plays.
    So what's so wrong about these things, the Regeneradors? I can summarize that by saying everything. The way they move is so inconsistent and disturbing. Their hyperventilating is creepy to say the least. Their theme music is some of the most hair-raising in the series. They deal pretty heavy damage when they attack you. They flop forward like demented fish when you knock their legs out from underneath them.
    And they regenerate, hence the name. You can blast them in the head with a fully-upgraded shotgun all you like. They're not going to die. At least not any time soon. The only ways to kill them are by shooting the Plagas inside them with a rifle equipped with an infrared scope or by unloading half your inventory into them. Since the latter is inconvenient and the former is inaccessible for a moment, the only sane option is to run.
    You run from the first Regenerador, horribly unnerved, and return to the previous area, hoping the thing isn't following you. You turn the corner, and oh my gosh, there's another one!! Like five feet from you! These things start coming out of the woodwork (or so it seems), forcing you to fight around them to progress to a part of the game that doesn't involve tears streaming down your face.
    Once you get your mitts on the infrared scope, yes, these things aren't quite as scary, 'cause now you can kill them without losing all your ammo. There's another variety of Regenerador called the Iron Maiden which is basically just a Regenerador with spikes, but somehow I always found the normal Regeneradors more frightening. And nothing beats those first few encounters with them.
    I think the Regeneradors could actually be even scarier if they really did follow you from area to area, ensuring you had to move quickly if you wanted to stay alive. They're scary enough as they are, but imagine that over-the-top feeling of being pursued by these things.
Giant Chainsaw Man. These guys aren't in the actual story, but they deserve a special spot on this list. Once you unlock the Mercenaries mode, you can participate in massive Ganados kill-fests to see how many points you can score before your time is up. In the Waterworld level, you'll occasionally have to deal with larger versions of the chainsaw guys you encountered in the main game.
    What sets these guys apart from their ordinary counterparts is not their size, but their tactics. Normal chainsaw guys just run at you revving their weapons to intimidate you, and yes, they usually spell death for you in close encounters. Their giant cousins, on the other hand, just swing up and down like there's no tomorrow, running at you erratically and guaranteeing an instant decapitation if you come near them.
    Scary enough, but you can't lose these guys, either. You can climb up ladders, climb down ladders, take shortcuts throughout the level, and do everything in your power to get them stuck somewhere, but these things are inhuman! They will find you, and they will kill you. They also don't flinch easily, so good luck standing still and shooting them in the head to make them back off. Take advantage of exploding barrels and prepare for a lot of running.

The point of this article is not to prove that Resident Evil 4 is a scary game, because as a whole, it's really not. It has its moments of terror, but the whole game can be defined as "creepy," which is a milder form of horror. The point of the article was to say Resident Evil can still be scary while providing more control over the main character and putting a little more action into the game. Do I want Gears of War with Resident Evil characters? No, that's a little too much action and not enough survival. I'm just talking about the control schemes, like running, aiming, and dodging. You can still have more control over the main characters and be scared, and I'd love to see Resident Evil flesh this out in the future.
    So what are your views? Can Resident Evil still be scary with a little more action and control? Or does it require pre-set camera angles and more limited controls to strike terror in the player? Comment your opinion below (it only takes a second), and I'll write to you later.