ADMIT ONE · Raccoon City Night Shift · Seat: Near the Exit, Keys in Hand
Zach Cregger took one medical courier, one snowy night and one package bound for Raccoon City, and turned it into the biggest opening the Resident Evil movies have ever had (Tom's Guide). As of October 5 it was still in theaters and past $126 million at the domestic box office (The Numbers).
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a guy who takes a double-pay delivery job, hits a woman who walks into the road and doesn't stay down, and spends the rest of the night screaming, fumbling his bullets and running from things that used to be people (The Verge, RogerEbert.com). A lot of it is gross, and a surprising amount of it is funny.
Critics keep naming the same ancestors: Sam Raimi's horror-comedy, John Carpenter's creatures, George Romero's dead (/Film, RogerEbert.com). So that's where we went digging.
Heads up: Resident Evil (2026) is already on goodrecmovies. Every pick below is on the site too, and every one in the main list is a horror movie. The one non-horror cousin gets its own labeled spot at the bottom.
Tear the stub: if Raccoon City got under your skin
Start with Cregger's last one. Seventeen kids from the same classroom walk out of their homes at 2:17 a.m. and vanish, and the whole town turns on their teacher (Julia Garner). Austin Abrams is in this one too. Amy Madigan won an Oscar as Aunt Gladys, and once she arrives, the scares and the laughs start landing in the same breath.
Jim (Cillian Murphy) is a bike courier who wakes from a coma in an empty London hospital. The city is deserted, and the infected run. ScreenRant spotted the neat flip: Jim starts the movie inside the hospital, while Bryan spends his whole night trying to reach one (ScreenRant). Danny Boyle shot it rough and fast, and that walk through a silent London still lands.
A workaholic dad (Gong Yoo) takes his young daughter on the train to Busan to see her mother, and an outbreak boards with them. Yeon Sang-ho moves the fight car by car, almost like levels in a game. Under the outbreak, it's a story about a dad learning to show up for his kid. Subtitled.
A TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman tag along with Barcelona firefighters on a night call to an apartment building. Then the authorities seal the doors from outside. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza shot it as found footage, so you're stuck on the stairwell with everyone else. Subtitled.
A research station in Antarctica, a crew of men, and an alien that can copy any one of them. RogerEbert.com and /Film both see Carpenter's creature work in Cregger's monsters, and once you watch this, you'll see it too. Kurt Russell plays MacReady, who stays calm while nobody on the base can trust anybody else.
/Film calls this the closest match, and it's easy to see why. Bruce Campbell's Ash goes to a cabin in the woods, plays the wrong tape, and spends the night fighting the dead, the house and eventually his own hand. Sam Raimi stages every scare like a joke and every joke like a scare. The rougher original, The Evil Dead (1981), is on the site too.
Before Middle-earth, Peter Jackson made this. A Sumatran rat-monkey bites Lionel's overbearing mother at the zoo, and pretty soon the house is full of the dead. In the US it was released as Dead Alive. If Resident Evil's rats made you laugh and wince at the same time, this is that feeling for an entire movie. It's one of the goriest comedies ever made, so pick your dinner timing carefully.
Shaun (Simon Pegg) is stuck in a dead-end job and a stalled relationship, and he's slow to notice the zombies. His big plan: grab his mum, grab his girlfriend, hole up at the pub. Edgar Wright's zombie comedy runs on the same fuel as Bryan, a regular guy who is very bad at being a hero.
Two guys at a medical supply warehouse open an army canister they really shouldn't, and by nightfall a whole cemetery is getting up. Medical deliveries go badly in this one too. Dan O'Bannon's punk-rock zombie comedy is the movie that made zombies hungry for brains.
Strangers barricade themselves in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while the dead close in. George A. Romero's black-and-white original gave us the modern movie zombie. According to /Film, Romero came very close to making his own Resident Evil movie, and he did direct a live-action commercial for the Resident Evil 2 game (/Film). Duane Jones as Ben is still one of the great horror leads.
Val and Earl (Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward) are two handymen trying to leave the tiny desert town of Perfection, Nevada, the same week giant worms start moving under the ground. It's a creature feature about regular guys improvising with whatever they've got, and it's very funny about it.
Not horror, but Bryan would get it
A cousin rather than a horror movie: /Film picked it for the "one long night" shape (/Film). Martin Scorsese's black comedy follows a mild New York office worker (Griffin Dunne) who heads downtown for a date and can't get home all night. If the part you loved was one bad night that keeps getting worse, start here.
Want more nights like this? The full best horror movies list is here. If your movie buddy can't handle slime, try scary movies that aren't gory, and if you're also watching Flanagan's new show, there's movies like Carrie.