Resident Evi ushered in a new era for the Zombie genre.

George Romero agreed
>I may be misquoting you, but you said something a long time ago about how you’d warn first time filmmakers off making a zombie movie. Is this something you still feel today?
>Well, especially now! [Laughs] Yeah, they’re taking over! Yeah, so many people… I don’t know why they’re drawn to them or why it… first of all, I think video games have popularised the zombie much more than films. Because, you know, really, the first film to gross a $100 million for a zombie movie was Zombieland, which was fairly recent. And the remake of Dawn did about $75 million, but anyway, it’s not the kind of numbers that Hollywood is going to rush to, thinking that this is going to be a trend. So I don’t know what happened, but I think the zombie became popular because of Resident Evil and because of House of the Dead and because of video games more than anything else.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190602105122/http://paulweedon.co.uk/george-romero-transcript/

So does Alex Garland
>Yeah, completely. It was because I'd seen Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead on my neighbor's VCR when I was 13 years old, and I thought, wow! That's where it comes from, and actually, to be -- in fact, I say that's where it comes from; it's partially where it comes from. It also came -- because, I don't know, probably a year or two before I wrote 28 Days, Resident Evil got released. Sometimes 28 Days Later is credited with reviving the zombie genre in some respect, but actually, I think it was Resident Evil that did it because I remember playing Resident Evil, having not really encountered zombies for quite a while, and thinking: oh, my god, I love zombies! I'd forgotten how much I love zombies. These are awesome!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-director-alex-g_b_7038618