Resident Evil: Village has finally released to widespread fanfare, a bulk of which has surrounded the villainous Lady Alcina Dimitrescu and her huge vampiric body. But as any fan will know, the massive matriarch of Castle Dimitrescu pales in size next to some of the other monstrosities Capcom has unleashed onto the gaming world, be they humanoid or eldritch abominations.
The creatures ranked here will only be ordered by size, not weight, design, or even scariness. Size isn't everything, after all. Then again, a monster's measurements do make up more than a morsel of its intimidation factor, as will soon be apparent.
Updated January 29th, by Matthew Mckeown: As the series went on, Resident Evil certainly scaled up in terms of set-pieces, story beats, cartoonish villains, and most important of all, monster sizes. When it began the biggest creatures faced were roughly room-sized due to limitations of the hardware, yet still the likes of Yawn the giant snake, the massive alligator in the sewers, or the Megalodon in the early Umbrella labs were pretty iconic.
Over the years, and subsequent games, the scale only grew. Now monsters regularly dwarf the protagonists, with some being building-sized and above in terms of their sheer size Some of them are more memorable than others, so here’s an updated rundown of some more of the largest monsters in the Resident Evil franchise.
16 Lady Dimetrescu
When trailers for Resident Evil: Village were making the rounds, not much was known about the game, except that there was a certain very large lady involved. Of course, the internet exploded, instantly loving the character, and began churning out countless jokes and memes that instantly made her a fan favorite well before the game came out. Despite her appearance in Village being in just one brief section that’s over in roughly an hour, Lady D is still certainly memorable.
In her human form, she towers over Ethan, is capable of tossing him around like a ragdoll, and has Nemesis-style finger tentacles that can slice you apart if she catches you. But her monster form is where things get really large. She turns into a horrifically mutated and Cronenburg-esque Dragon form that can not only fly, but is absolutely massive and has a large gaping maw filled with teeth that could easily eat someone whole. It’s a memorable encounter that’s quite unexpected with how it turns from a Vampire house of horrors to a bio-terror set piece fight at the end.
15 Salvatore Moreau
A surprising blend of Del Lago and Irving, Moreau is another great massive fish monster boss encountered in Resident Evil: Village. When he’s first encountered he’s not much a threat and more a loathsome, melancholic mess. But after he loses control of his mutation, that’s when things kick up a notch.
He becomes a massive, mangled monstrosity of fish parts and tentacles that has one objective, to kill Ethan. But by draining his pond you’re able to see his full nightmarish form and take him on toe-to-toe. The fight itself is fairly easy since you can just damage dump on him, but his constant writhing and worryingly fast speed for a beached monster still make him quite the threat. His encounter is brief, but it’s certainly memorable.
14 Ricardo Irving
Say what you want about Resident Evil Five, it brought us the best version of Wesker and Ricardo Irving, a New Jersey accented nutcase with an inferiority complex. Encountered on a gunboat, in his human form he’s a small weasel of a person that seems more comedic relief than an actual threat. However, one Uroboros injection later and the laughter at his expense quickly stops.
Ricardo in monster form was, at the time, the biggest ghoul the series had thrown at us so far. His entire fight is a turret set-piece, and unless solid teamwork is used he can paste you all over the deck pretty easily. Sporting huge tentacles, an utterly massive whale form, and a weak point hidden inside, Irving is a brief spotlight of anarchy in an otherwise fairly plodding game.
13 Derek Simmons
Where to start with Simmons. As a human, he was the National Security Advisor, a member of The Family, and the primary antagonist of Leon's story in RE6. But his monster form is possibly the most interesting and frustrating to deal with in the entire Resident Evil Franchise. Like the other bosses in Resident Evil Six, Simmons pops back up a lot, turning from a major threat into more of an annoyance as the game goes on. But his monster forms are pretty memorable, interesting, and above all, big.
In the same vein as classic RE creatures like Nemesis, Birkin, and beyond, Simmons has a multi-phase mutation that gets more complex and visceral as things wear on. His first mutation is an agile quadruped form not unlike a giant tiger with a Gatling gun he can pull out for ranged attacks. The other is a cyclopean, laser-spewing T-Rex and the final form is a giant insectoid that can only be damaged using bolts of lightning. A few of these encounters become bombastic set-pieces depending on the character’s facing off against him, so it’s a creature encounter that’s kept somewhat fresh. A monster we haven’t seen the likes of since, Simmons is a hard act to follow.
12 William Birkin
Introduced alongside Nemesis, William Birkin was the second heavy hitter in Resident Evil 2 that was an instant fan favorite. Despite being the cause of the G-Virus which destroyed the lives of a lot of people, you can’t help but feel a little sympathetic for Birkin. Despite his moral and ethical shortcomings.
His monster forms are the most memorable though as it was Capcom really flexing its creative muscle with how grotesque and warped they could make someone infected with the G-Virus. From an overmuscled and mindless hulk to a fast-moving, multi-limbed predator before ending in a giant shoggoth-esque blob monster, Birkin has quite the rollercoaster of transformation. It’s a design that’s been cosplayed and referenced countless times as the series went on and it really solidified Birkin as one of the iconic massive monsters in the franchise.
11 The Alligator
Based on an old urban legend about giant gators in sewers, the massive leathery beast encountered in the first Resident Evil was for many their first encounter with a large monster in a horror game. Able to instantly kill you with its massive jaws and being incredibly tanky, the Alligator is another OG Resident Evil monster that’s stood the test of time.
Encounter only in the sewers, this large creature was once a humble Sewer Gator that got infected by the T-Virus and absolutely ballooned in size. For many, it seemed like it had been ripped right out of a b-movie with how unexpected and sudden its appearance was. Though it’s slow, it was dispatched in a supremely satisfying way. Akin to Jaws, it gets killed when it has a fuel canister stuck in its mouth, which is then shot, detonating the creature's head into gooey chunks.
10 El Gigante
The Resident Evil Archives measure these Plagas-infected giants at roughly 22-23 feet tall. Considering their feet almost completely cover a normal human's body when stepping on them, that seemed hard to dispute, but it does beg the question of how these measurements were taken.
Does that measurement reflect their height when standing straight up? Does it only measure them as they appear in the game, hunched back and all? How did anyone even get one to hold still long enough to take its height when Resident Evil 4 shows a group of 12 men as being completely incapable of controlling even one? Whatever the case, you won't catch Leon body-slamming these giants.
9 Karl Heisenberg
No, he's not the genius German theoretical physicist of the same name, but he is undeniably intelligent. Karl's genius instead lies in his talents as a mechanical engineer and if you've already forgotten that from your latest Resident Evil Village playthrough, one look at his mutated monster form is all you'll need to remember.
The screeching metal monstrosity appears to be of comparable height to an El Gigante (even down to the back condition) but with a much greater wingspan thanks to his disproportionately long cyborg arms.
8 Ogroman
As much as its name makes it out to be some kind of ogre-themed superhero, this Resident Evil 6 boss is anything but child-friendly. In truth, the Ogromen were a series of giant bio-organic weapons dispatched by the Edonian Liberation Army in order to be the worst Christmas present ever for their enemies in the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance.
No word from Capcom on their size, but cutscenes show them to be about as tall as the cargo helicopter that carried one onto the battlefield despite being curled up into a ball. With real helicopters reaching up to 15 feet in height, this means that an Ogroman standing up could make a standard car look like a Hot Wheel.
7 Jack Baker
First-person games like Resident Evil VII make judging monster height a lot harder than usual since the player's character model can no longer be used for reference. Luckily, the Baker family patriarch's boss fight takes place in a boathouse that seems to be about 3 stories high. Jack's incredibly long neck and limbs never try reaching straight up, but the fact that he seems just shy of reaching two stories without extending his appendages means he could probably stretch up to a third.
6 Ramon Salazar
Great things come in small packages, and so do great monsters. The pint-sized Spanish castellan may normally look comically small for the age of 20, but that's nothing a little horrific mutation courtesy of the Las Plagas parasites can't fix.
When Salazar and his servant fuse with the Queen Plaga, they grow big enough to almost completely fill a 3-story cathedral, putting them just a bit higher than Jack Baker in terms of both height and rank on this list.
5 Del Lago
Finally, another monster with an official size given by Capcom. The official guidebook lists Resident Evil 4's first boss at over 65 feet in length. It seems accurate too, especially to anyone who's had to try and keep Leon S. Kennedy away from the swimming giant. At least it makes for a fairly easy target for the federal agent's apparently limitless supply of harpoons. On a lighter note, the Del Lago was once a common salamander before being mutated only to now easily outsize a brachiosaurus.
4 Nemesis-T Type
This hulking behemoth was nicknamed "The Pursuer" in his original Resident Evil 3 appearance, but "The Grower" would arguably be a much more accurate moniker. He starts off at a pretty intimidating estimate of about 7-foot-3 but then keeps transforming and getting bigger and bigger.
At his peak, the fully transformed Nemesis is so large that a 3+ story scientific compound can no longer contain him. And when you add his countless limbs that always seem to be reaching further and further to the equation, you've got the third biggest monster in the series.
3 Malacoda
Resident Evil Revelations' Malacoda bears similarities to many other famous monsters. It's named after the demon guarding the twelfth circle of hell in The Divine Comedy, its main body seems to invoke the xenomorph queen from Aliens and it has enormous Kraken-esque tentacles, but it's much larger than any of them.
Although its original host body seems to have been a whale, the Malacoda grows to be roughly the size of an entire cruise ship, which can often stretch to over 1,000 feet.
2 Eveline
Eveline is an evil resident of the Baker family who's most notable for having an even greater evil residing in her body. When she lets it out, Eveline transforms into an incomprehensibly massive bioweapon. Seriously, the size of her final form is impossible to comprehend.
With no official data from Capcom and only incomplete glimpses seen in Resident Evil VII, fans have yet to understand the full extent of her size, but she seems capable of reaching roughly the same size as the forest she lives in.
1 Haos
No official size has been given for this genocidal beast, but it makes Chris Redfield's Hulk-esque Resident Evil 6 body look like that of an ant compared to just a finger when at its maximum size.
Even calling that its maximum size may be underselling the Haos' incredible mass. It's fully capable of growing and shrinking its body, and the limits of this ability have yet to be established. Plus, when you consider that it's only ever been seen in its infant state and could likely reach an even greater size as it matures, there's no telling just how big the Haos could be.