Resident Evil Village: 10 Scariest Moments In Dimitrescu Castle

Content Warning: This article discusses violent and gory themes.

The latest game in the long-running Resident Evil survival horror series, Resident Evil Village, is now available, and players around the world can enjoy the terror of being hunted by werewolves, baby creatures, and creepy dolls. Resident Evil 8 has many fantastic locations, but none as expansive and memorable as Castle Dimitrescu.

The gigantic home of the giant vampire Lady Dimitrescu and her three bug-controlling daughters, who feature in all the game’s marketing, is only the first location in Village, but it’s filled with truly terrifying shocks. While Beneviento House may take the award for sheer psychological terror, Castle Dimitrescu is where the player will jump out of their seats the most.

10 Heisenberg Capture

The first big scare in Castle Dimitrescu comes almost as soon as the player enters the grounds. After leaving the demo area of the village, there’s an inviting switch that turns out to be a trap.

A bearded man with a hammer and powers like Magneto from X-Men, Heisenberg, grabs Ethan and drags him before Mother Miranda and the rest of the four lords. He then subjects Ethan to a series of nerve-wracking death traps and another encounter with a giant, who nearly kills him again. It’s one of the most shocking sections of the game, and it’s just the start of Castle Dimitrescu.

9 First Daughter Appears

A short way into the castle proper, Ethan is jumped by the three vampire daughters – Bela, Cassandra, and Daniela. After bringing him before her mother, Lady Alcina Dimitrescu, and hanging him by hooks from the ceiling, Ethan barely escapes and is pursued by the family.

However, this doesn’t become evident until Cassandra suddenly appears in a swarm of flies as Ethan uses the eye jewel to open a locked door. It’s the first time the player directly faces one of the vampire women, and the correct response isn’t to fight. It’s to run. Fast.

8 The Dark Dungeon

After escaping from Cassandra, Ethan falls into the basement of the castle. His fortunes aren’t much better there, as it turns out to be a creepy, pitch-black dungeon where the entire former staff of the castle went to die. What’s worse is that most of them are still there as shambling undead monsters wielding swords and giant sickles.

The player hears them before they suddenly come out of the black void, and some even burst from the ground or through gaps in the wall. It’s a truly nightmarish encounter. But one so cool Capcom used it as the game’s first demo.

7 Blood Basement

Shortly after the death of the first daughter boss Bela, Ethan goes off in pursuit of his own daughter Rose and ends up in Alcina’s private quarters. Before he can get there, however, he has to solve one of Village‘s most annoying puzzles and head into the wine cellar, or more likely, the blood-soaked basement.

Whatever red liquid it is, it floods the basement to waist height, and anything could be hiding down there. Observant players will spot ripples long before anything happens – until suddenly a zombie jumps out at them from beneath the surface. Terrifying.

6 Finding The Dimitrescu Key

Following the bloody basement, the player climbs a ladder and finds that they’ve taken the long way to snoop on Lady Dimitrescu’s chambers. As the iconic Lady D makes an angry phone call to Mother Miranda and throws a table at the wall, Ethan sneaks in to find Rose missing but grabs the Dimitrescu Key instead.

However, just as he’s going to leave, Lady Dimitrescu suddenly walks back through the door and grabs Ethan. It’s one of the biggest jump-scares in the entire game, no matter how happy many players are to see the giant lady again.

5 Cutting Off Ethan’s Hand

Based on her history, it would seem that it’s rare for anyone to survive an encounter with Lady Alcina, and Ethan nearly doesn’t. In fact, he plunges several floors down into another part of the basement or dungeon area, with Lady Dimitrescu swearing revenge for her daughter’s death.

After Ethan makes his way through the small area, he encounters a set of iron bars, but luckily the switch to retract them is on his side. Unfortunately, just as he starts to pull it, a huge blade cuts down the screen, and Ethan finds his hand severed. Getting a hand cut off by Lady D is only the start of this nerve-wracking encounter.

4 Daughter In The Attic

After escaping from Lady D once more and making it to the small room with the Mask of Pleasure, Ethan finds himself locked in unless he can find something to replace the Mask with on the statue he got it from. Fortunately, there’s a secret passage in the fireplace that leads into a small attic room with a suspicious goat skull that might just do the trick.

Unfortunately, Cassandra decides to pick this moment and this tiny, cramped room to ambush Ethan. With no apparent windows to smash or open, what follows is a desperate panic until the player realizes they can blow up the wall with a pipe bomb.

3 Gargoyles?

It’s almost a relief when the game allows the player to go outside again, albeit onto the roof area of the castle. It seems unlikely that any zombies or the remaining Dimitrescus would venture up this high, so the player must surely be safe – until they realize that those ominous black winged creatures aren’t birds, bats, or gargoyles.

They’re flying zombies, and they can attack at any point from any side, including from directly above. Far from being the safe haven it initially seemed, the roof is actually one of the tensest areas in Village.

2 Lady Dimitrescu Transforms

After finishing off all the daughters and finding all the masks, Ethan makes it to the castle church. He then finds the dagger that’s supposed to be able to kill Lady Dimitrescu – at which point, she immediately appears and stabs Ethan.

He manages to get her back, at which point she transforms into a giant bat monster. What follows is a tense, terrifying boss encounter in a scarily small area on the castle’s rooftops, with barely anywhere to hide. The transformed Lady D is a real challenge and one of the scariest parts of Resident Evil Village.

1 Rose Revelation

The scariest and most horrifying part of Castle Dimitrescu occurs right at the very end, just after Ethan defeats and destroys the transformed Lady Alcina Dimitrescu. The player discovers a strange, ugly flask, and that seems to be the only reward for going through this entire chapter of the game, not Ethan’s baby daughter Rose as expected.

Returning to Duke at the altar, he asks Ethan to check the flask more closely – at which point, the player discovers that they’re holding the severed head of a baby. It’s disgusting and truly nightmarish – something that sums up Castle Dimitrescu pretty well.