One Of Resident Evil's Fundamental Joys Is Watching Beautiful Men Get Hurt

The Resident Evil series is celebrating its 30-year anniversary today, March 22, 2025. Below, we look at the way the series subversively blends thirst traps with horrific thrills.

Leon Kennedy is tied up. The henchmen of cult leader Osmund Saddler have injected him with Las Plagas–an ancient, zombifying parasite. His hands are cuffed to a chain, at the other end of which is Kennedy’s sometimes-ally Luis Sera. They work together to get free. There is a rhythm between them as they pull on the chain. Their muscles are taut, they trade grunts like drumbeats. For now, their bodies are triumphant. Yet, in just a few short hours, Luis will be dead and Leon will be coughing up blood, while Las Plagas takes more and more hold of him. This is just one moment across Resident Evil’s 30-year history, but it is far from a unique one. The franchise puts its stars in constant peril. Because that peril is so fixated on the body and its permeability, it often has an erotic dimension. It’s easy to limit this to the games’ casts of femme fatales and women-in-peril, but it is the men, especially Leon Kennedy, who bear the brunt of it in practice. One of the series’ sincere pleasures is watching beautiful people, but especially beautiful men, get hurt.

In part, this is a consequence of Resident Evil’s mechanical ideas. In most shooters and action games, the player cannot really get injured. The body of the Doomslayer, to take one example, is almost a pure machine, operating with total efficiency until the very moment of death. In Resident Evil, each and every hit has consequences. When Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine get hurt, they start to limp. Moving slower means it is more difficult to evade enemies, which means they might have to use more ammo to kill them. Best then, to take as few hits as possible. Their survival depends on vigilance. The body is something that can change, even if a few green herbs can patch it up. As the series morphed into almost pure action, it never lost this fixation.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

Furthermore, the zombie itself represents a transformed body. A bite or a cut turns you from a normal person to a mindless cannibal. The moment of change is so small that one can hide it. Yet, once the transformation is complete, it is so total that the person becomes unrecognizable. The genre has an obvious racial dimension. A zombie is, quite literally, a genetically compromised person. You can kill a zombie without guilt, because it is only person-shaped. Whatever rights it once had are hollowed out. The still electrifying zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead, underlines this truth in its haunting ending, where a Black man is mistaken for one of the living dead and killed on sight. Therefore, the threat which Resident Evil’s heroes face is that difference between human and monster.

While the interest in the body is part of the series from the beginning, Resident Evil 4 escalates it. The fixed camera angles of previous entries meant that there was a distance from the player characters. Moving into a new room meant that you could be far away or close up to them. In RE4, the camera swings with Leon’s hip and zooms forward with his gun. It was also one of the first games of its kind to have extensive death cutscenes. Finding different ways to die and watching Leon be torn apart, or hanged, or sliced in twain with a chainsaw is almost a minigame of its own. Games like Tomb Raider (2012) and Dead Space would exaggerate this impulse, making their deaths into miniature, fake snuff films and hyper-gory, dreamy sci-fi horror a la Event Horizon, respectively.

Yet, neither of those quite have the horny eye that RE4 constantly indulges. Leon is the subject of sexual interest almost everywhere he goes. Both men and women desire him. Ashley, the president’s daughter whom Leon was sent to rescue, has an instant schoolgirl crush on him. He flirts with his handler. Ada appears to do something mysterious and flirt with him. But it’s not only the women who have this dynamic with him. The most obvious is Leon’s former trainer Krauser, who stalks Leon through one area and fights him at the conclusion. Unlike the boss fights with Saddler or Ramon Salazar, Krauser only partially transforms. He remains a prime specimen, with a shiny chest and a chiseled jaw. The battle is intimate throughout. Leon and Krauser duel with knives, pulling their bodies closer before breaking apart. The battle is homoerotic to a comical degree.

To be clear, it’s not as if women are totally exempt from this dichotomy. Most of the co-op pairs in Resident Evil 5 and 6 have a female partner. Even Resident Evil 4 has Separate Ways, a bonus campaign where you play as antihero Ada Wong. She wears a red silk dress and struts more than walks. She vaults up cliff walls and barricades with gymnastic panache. Yet, over the series’ 30-year history, every main entry has at least one male player character. By sheer numbers, the series is more often hurting men than women.

Resident Evil Requiem

Resident Evil 9 mostly continues what RE4 started. Here, Leon is still diseased and coughing up blood. This time, it’s a lingering illness from his encounter with the T-virus way back in Resident Evil 2. But the interest doesn’t stop in plot details. You can play both sections of the game in first- or third-person, but the game suggests in a tooltip that you play as Grace in first-person and Leon in third. You embody Grace, but you watch Leon. Fitting with this, Leon’s animations are detailed. He slings or holsters his weaponry on his body. Every time you switch weapons, he wrangles with the straps and leather accessories. His back is hunched over. As he runs, he grunts and moans. He is a kind of action-hero eye candy.

Even the other characters in the game know it. In an early scene, villain Dr. Victor Gideon has captured Leon and tied him to a chair. While examining him for signs of the T-virus infection, he brushes Leon’s hair aside and caresses his cheek. It’s an example of his villainy, even his perversion. But it’s also the kind of looking that Requiem encourages in the first place.

Horror is made of these kinds of mixes. Gore can be horrifying or gratifying, often both at once. It’s no consequence that slasher films often boil down to a beautiful woman facing off against a grotesque man. Resident Evil draws on countless of these dichotomies through its constant drawing on B-movies and horror flicks. Yet, it is this fundamental image that defines the series. In a darkened hallway, a man stands alone. He fires off a few shots in the dark before rotten arms embrace him, then bite into his shoulder in a bloody kiss. The two struggle, almost dance, but the man triumphs. He shifts his weight, compensating for his shoulder wound and raises his gun again. What could be sexier than that?

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