Watch Sweet Home, the Japanese horror movie that inspired Resident Evil

There would be no Resident Evil without Sweet Home, the 1989 Japanese horror movie directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, now better known for films like Cure, Pulse, and Creepy. Sweet Home had a huge influence on Capcom’s groundbreaking foray into survival horror, largely in part because the original Resident Evil began development as a remake of a video game based on Sweet Home.

Thanks to video preservation group Kineko Video, you can now watch Sweet Home in 4K and subtitled in English, for free, on YouTube. A version of Sweet Home, ripped from a VHS copy of the film, was previously available on YouTube, but only in 360p resolution. Kineko Video’s upload is taken from the LaserDisc version of Sweet Home and features newly translated subtitles.

Sweet Home is a supernatural horror movie — not a zombie flick — set in a haunted mansion deep in the woods. The film tells the story of a film crew that visits the abandoned home of artist Ichiro Mamiya, whose frescos remain inside the mansion. So too does the tortured spirit of his late wife, Lady Mamiya, who terrorizes and possesses members of the crew.

Sweet Home is full of grisly practical effects; the victims of the Mamiya mansion are gruesomely burned, melted, and cleaved in half in bloody fashion. At one point, one of the women in the crew is chased by a man who’s nothing but an upper torso — a grim image that appears to have carried over to Resident Evil.

Capcom adapted Sweet Home as a horror role-playing game for Nintendo’s Famicom console, and both the game and movie launched the same year. The Sweet Home video game is full of jump scares and gory monsters, as well as a limited inventory system that would go on to inspire Resident Evil.

Resident Evil game director Shinji Mikami told GameSpot in a 2016 interview about the origins of his survival horror game, and how Sweet Home influenced it.

“The meeting that got the ball rolling on Resident Evil was in 1993,” Mikami said. “We were in Capcom’s Osaka development studio and my current boss, Tokuro Fujiwara, called me in to talk to him. He said that he wanted us to make a horror game using systems from Sweet Home, which was a horror game for the Famicom that he had directed. I was actually a big fan of Sweet Home, and he was someone that I really respected, so I was excited about the project from the beginning.”

Image: Capcom

The Sweet Home video game, like Resident Evil, features gameplay that involves puzzle-solving and item management, as well as survival mechanics. Players can take on the role of any member of the film crew as they explore the mansion and endure random monster encounters against zombies, ghosts, and boil-covered horrors. The 8-bit game’s story is told through cutscenes and notes found in the environment, similar to Resident Evil’s narrative presentation.

If you want to play Sweet Home, which was never released outside of Japan or officially localized, you’ll have to turn to emulators and fan translation patches. There’s less of a barrier to enjoy the original film, thankfully, which is delightful and schlocky in the most endearing ways, but has been limited to release on physical analog formats like VHS and LaserDisc.

There’s one more good reason to watch Sweet Home if you’re a video game fan with a taste for trivia. The movie’s soundtrack was composed by Masaya Matsuura of the band Psy-S — though he’s probably better known now as the co-creator of PlayStation games PaRappa the Rapper and Vib-Ribbon.