Resident Evil Village director shares the process behind creating its imposing antagonist

“When trying out new ideas, we start by pursuing something extreme. As we progress, the idea usually starts deviating from pure horror. So in the end we have to bring the experience back to horror.”

- Resident Evil Village director Morimasa Sato shares how his team finds room to innovate in an established franchise.

As far as social media is concerned, Capcom has already knocked it out of the park with Resident Evil Village or, specifically, with one of the game's major antagonists. But, according to comments from art director Tomonori Takano and director Morimasa Sato, the elegant, imposing, and 9’6” tall villain Lady Dimitrescu took Capcom some work to perfect.

The pair shared some concept art and dove into the team's process for creating Resident Evil Village's world and characters in a recent interview with IGN. In that chat, Sato notes that the setting of the upcoming horror game was built around the character concepts that emerged, similar, he says, to Resident Evil 4.

Sato explains that their brainstorming process tends to start off extreme, in this case a gothic castle populated by 100 witches that preyed exclusively on men. Workshopping from the extreme allowed the team to distill that concept down into something truly scary: one very tall lady and her three equally dangerous daughters (that prey exclusively on men).

“We tried a lot of different things in order to make the Countess scary and feel like a boss character," Sato tells IGN. "There were ideas to make her more creature-like as well, but in the end we felt that a towering woman was the most simple yet powerful thing we could do."

The full interview shares more details on how Lady Dimitrescu evolved from a mockup using a Resident Evil 7 character model to something truly scary, as well as how those decisions fed back into the creation of a setting that refreshes the gothic with just the right touch of modern.