"Vacant Room" first plays in the 2002 remake of the original Resident Evil when you play as Jill in the Dormitory/Guardhouse after leaving the mansion. It plays when you first enter the room using the Residence Key where the Umbrella Employee has hanged themselves. Just this song and the slow, metronome-quality creaking of the rope as the body gently sways. What happens next has been burned into my memory since I first played the game on the PlayStation 26 years ago, and I was thankful the scene was kept. After Jill enters the bathroom, there is a sound. In the original PlayStation version, I recall it sounding like a digitally compressed "thump,"* but in the GameCube remake, it was a snap and thud simultaneously.
It's pretty obvious what this meant, but to 20-year-old me, who had never played a survival horror game extensively, I really hoped the sound didn't mean that the person who had been hanging just a moment ago was now up and moving around. But that's exactly what that sound meant. And that's an awesome, fun realization.
Musically, the star here is the tinkling piano with the accompanying "aahing" vocals. And the tinkling piano part is really just two notes, repeated over and over with slightly different note lengths. Then at 9 seconds into the song, the tinkling piano part doubles (triples?), creating a frantic rhythm while the tempo remains the same. I used "tinkling" to describe the first piano, because the second piano that comes in at 0:35 has a more typical sound while it plays a slightly off-kilter run with seemingly no tonal center.
I believe this song is used again in another Residence room where the player learns about the V-Jolt substance (if they don't know already) and leads into the fight with Plant 42. For me, though, "Vacant Room" will always be the theme for the Residence room where the developers did exactly what I had hoped wouldn't happen, which is exactly why it needed to happen.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Really Don't Know Why I Can't Spit it Out
*The problem with trying to locate a YouTube video focusing on this specific moment is that the majority of the longplays I found all skip going into the room and instead head straight for the bathroom and drain the bathtub. All three longplays I watched could have been the same video except for the channel tag or watermark, but their actions were all in the same order and nearly identical. I guess I'll just have to replay the original version and make sure that I get the bad (which is actually the best) ending.
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