Filmmaker Brandon Salisbury is a Pennsylvania boy through and through. Raised in and continually residing in the Keystone State, the movie buff-turned-Marine-turned-YouTuber and now documentarian owes his love of the medium, like so many who grew up near Steel City, to George A. Romero.

“October 1 last year was George A. Romero Day in Pittsburgh,” he recalls. “[George] and [producer] Russ Streiner helped bring the film industry [here]. A lot of people that worked with George, they still reside in the Pittsburgh area so there’s a lot of mentorship and a lot of networking and connection [opportunities] for people that are pursuing this career path that can connect with George through the people that he's touched over the years. It’s amazing!”

Salisbury remembers his first exposure to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead at the tender age of five scaring him so badly that he almost swore off zombie movies for good. But around 1997 he received a PlayStation for Christmas, and everything changed.

“They were just playing this ad over and over – I can still [see] the live-action zombie in the alleyway, they’re showing this weird skinless monster crawling on a ceiling,” he remembers. “There’s a guy that's freaking out and this alligator just comes out and bites at the character at the end and you hear a guy saying, ‘Everyone’s going to die.’ [I said] ‘Holy shit. I need to play this.’”

That game, you may have guessed, was Resident Evil 2, Capcom’s hotly anticipated follow-up to the studio’s original survival horror groundbreaker, and when Salisbury finally got his eager hands on the physical release, he noticed something curious.

“There’s a sticker on [the box that] says ‘win a part in the movie.’ [I was] like, 'holy shit, there’s going to be a movie already?' A few months later the official announcement came and it was ‘George Romero’s directing Resident Evil.’”

That project never came to fruition, but Salisbury kept up with it through his teenage years, early adulthood, and into the present day, when he saw an opportunity to dig deeper into the events surrounding the Resident Evil movie that could have been.

“I followed every possible shred of information. I still remember when the screenplay finally leaked on the internet and I’m reading the pages faster than what my shitty printer could print out,” he says. “This was something that spoke deeply to me, this is a film that I really wanted, and I was disappointed, pissed off when I didn’t get it, and I think a lot of fans felt that way.”

So, he finally decided to set the story straight by recruiting co-writer Robbie McGregor for the upcoming doc, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil, which does just that.

Made up of interviews with gaming industry insiders and Romero collaborators plus a wealth of unearthed archival footage and never-before-seen documents (all narrated by Pablo Kuntz, the Canadian actor who originally voiced the game franchise’s big bad Albert Wesker), George A. Romero’s Resident Evil doesn’t merely tell the story of one of horror/gaming’s great what-might-have-beens but seeks to examine the director’s career and its direct influence on one of the biggest names in gaming.

The story goes that in 1998, Capcom hired Romero to direct a commercial to air in Japan promoting RE2. It so impressed Sony Pictures executives that they tasked the master of horror with adapting the game for the big screen. Once the script was in front of the suits, however, Romero was dropped. This was par for the course for a largely independent director who spent the bulk of his 1990s studio phase unable to get projects off the ground.

“He creates this genre, they make a video game, they hire him to direct the movie, then he gets fired,” exclaims Salisbury. “The movie that we got that was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson is directly responsible for helping to resuscitate the zombie genre that had been mostly dead – or undead, however you want to say it – and then by the time George gets back to making zombie movies, there’s like 500 zombie movies and his films just got lost in the shuffle. It’s a fucking shame.”

Anyone with a passing interest in filmmaking docs will naturally wonder how similar Salisbury’s project is to something like Jodorowsky’s Dune (the lauded 2013 feature examining the art house filmmaker’s similarly doomed attempt to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic in the mid-’70s) but for Salisbury, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil tells a much bigger story.

“Jodorowsky didn’t create the sci-fi genre, he didn’t create science fantasy. George Romero created zombie horror. He created the modern zombie. Fuck, I’d say George Romero gave birth to modern horror cinema.”

He continues: “There’s a direct line from what was made prior to what was made after, and Night of the Living Dead sits right there as the gateway into modern horror that leads all the way up like a chain reaction to Resident Evil.”

Fittingly, despite securing a license from Capcom and the blessing of Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil is itself an independent project, the result of staying resolute and doing whatever it takes to get a film made. Recognizing the need to add a unique flair in an increasingly oversaturated arena of fan-made horror docs (and compensate for the fact that the film it’s centred upon doesn’t actually exist), Salisbury decided to set the whole thing against a backdrop meant to conjure the Spencer Mansion – the house of horrors in which the original Resident Evil is set. But, in the process, he had unwittingly set himself up for all the headaches of a documentary and a narrative film.

“It was horrendous because we got there, we shot for three nights and it’s the middle of March but [we’re] about to get hit with a blizzard,” he groans. “We had several hours’ worth of outdoor filming to do and we were fighting against this fucking blizzard. Some of the last shit we shot actually has a couple snowflakes falling because we're fighting so hard to get these shots, and then it fucking dumps on us.”

Despite, or perhaps because of these struggles, the first-time director is pleased with the finished product, and views it as in keeping with the spirit of his favourite horror director.

“I cursed myself a long time ago: I told everyone that my mission was to make [the doc] feel like a George Romero movie, and that’s exactly what I fucking got: budget problems, rewrites, weather problems, scheduling problems; everything imaginable that you could probably think that George went through, we went through,” he says, laughing. “I definitely made it feel like a George Romero film.” ■