The film that helped birth the Resident Evil franchise, the 1989 Japanese horror Sweet Home is now watch online for free – in 4K. Hurrah!
Most readers will have heard of the Resident Evil videogame franchise or its – shall we say – uneven movie adaptations. Before those, though, there was Sweet Home, a 1989 horror film directed by cult Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa (you may have seen his terrific 2006 genre flick, Pulse).
Around the time of Sweet Home’s initial release, Capcom made a tie-in videogame – a top-down RPG which contained several of the survival horror elements we associate with the genre today. The makers of that game were none other than Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara – respectively, its director and producer – the pair that would go on to create the original Resident Evil in 1996.
In fact, Resident Evil itself began life as a Sweet Home game before Capcom decided to turn it into an unrelated game instead.
The original Sweet Home RPG was only officially released in Japan for the Nintendo Famicom (the country’s version of the NES), which means both it and the film which spawned it were lesser known entities for several years – though they’ve grown in cult stature since.
As first picked up by VG247, Sweet Home (the movie) is now available to watch on YouTube – for free, and in 4K. Given how tricky it previously was to track down, this is a bit of a treat for fans of horror or cult films in general. Although many of the details are different – Sweet Home is more of a haunted house film than a zombie gore-fest like Resident Evil – it’s still fascinating to see the roots of Capcom’s hit game franchise in all its 1980s glory.
We couldn’t embed the YouTube video in this post, unfortunately (it appears to have been flagged for its horror overtones), but you can find Sweet Home on the platform at this handy link.
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