When did cultist elements start appearing in RE?

[Mako Crab]

This is something I've been thinking about lately. I really love the gameplay of RE4, but the tone of the game is radically different from all other RE games. The major difference is that now instead of fighting against the Umbrella Corporation, a faceless entity that trades stock, puts on a front as a pharmaceutical company, and engineers viruses and bio-weapons for use in military operations, you're now fighting a religious cult. A borderline satanic cult right down to red robes and cattle-skull masks. Instead of a faceless corporation with no real head, we now have Sadler as the ringmaster of this cult and it's easy for us to target him and bring the whole thing down.

I sometimes can't help but think that Sadler and his cultists would feel more at home in a Silent Hill game. Part 4 is when I really started to notice it, but were these cultist elements creeping into the series before then? I seem to recall seeing something about death masks in the RE Remake on GameCube and thinking that was getting away from the tone of the original too, but I'm not sure.

 

[bSTAR_182]

Nah, they definitely wouldn't fit in a Silent Hill game, Capcom made the cultist elements their own and tried to play with something new for the Resident Evil series.

RE4 is the first game to really place any sort of emphasis on cult-like elements. I personally don't recall any kind of cultist material in the past games, though it has been some time since I've played any of the older games. If anything they may have religious items/materials scattered throughout the series, although that sort of thing can be considered commonplace to find in a society; it’s not significant to the story going on in Resident Evil like it is in Silent Hill.

I think it's kind of becoming apparent that the Umbrella Corporation is just a name in the series, despite the fact that the people in the corporation helped kick start the events in the Resident Evil series. The game series is really focused on the types of bad people who are more than willing to take the lives of others for the sake of power and wealth, and they all do this with the viruses and bioweapons that they have either created or come across. Considering the fact that the Umbrella Corp. reached its end by the time RE4 takes place and because Capcom still plans to push the series on with new characters and villains, it's really the only way you can interpret this game series.

 

[Silverback]

bSTAR, I think you hit the nail on the head. But yeah, it was the fourth installment that brought Religion into the serie's. And the death masks of RE:make don't have anything to do with cults, doctrines or such. But in the real world, who knows?

Some info on death masks - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_mask

Good idea for a thread, Mako Crab.