Movies based on video games have seldom done the source material justice. Today, we’ll talk about an outlier, an unknown treasure in the Cosmic Horror genre that succeeded in bringing the video game’s atmosphere to the big screen. Let’s investigate what made Silent Hill one of those rare instances.
The film begins with a mother desperately looking for her missing daughter Sharon. Sharon’s mother, Rose, is scared to find her daughter standing in a trance above a waterfall. Sharon passes out yelling the words Silent Hill as Rose pulls her back from the edge.
It is not the first time Sharon has sleepwalked and had recurring nightmares about the haunted town. Hoping to find answers about the trauma tormenting her adopted kid, Rose and Sharon decide to visit the abandoned town of nightmares.
We notice a sign that says, “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” as they are preparing to leave for their destiny. “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?” he asks, hinting at the chaos that awaits them.
Meanwhile, Sharon’s foster father, Chris, is shocked to realise how barren Silent Hill is and fears the trip would be a mistake, but it’s too late for him to persuade Rose to reconsider her choice. Sharon not only sleepwalks, but she also makes nefarious modifications to her drawings, for which she has no recollection of why, how, or when she did so.
Rose drives up to a petrol station to comfort Sharon, who is terrified. That is when we meet Cybil, the well-meaning Police Officer, clad in her leather jacket and her face hiding behind her helmet. Worried about the safety of the child, she decides to follow the car.
When asked to pull over, Rose panics and speeds towards Silent Hill. Scared she might hurt a pedestrian, the car skids as she pulls the break and lies behind the wheel unconscious. The town of Silent Hill is filled with fog and ashes falling from the sky as if snowfall.
Rose learns Sharon is nowhere to be found after regaining consciousness. Dahlia, a frantic-looking lady, dashes into her, muttering about how the inhabitants of the town are liars. Dahlia misidentifies Sharon as her daughter, Alessa, when she sees a picture of her.
Soon, night descends, and Rose begins to circle the silhouette of a girl who resembles Sharon. Rose sees shape-shifting creatures and corpses hung on barbed wires while chasing the youngster. She manages to get away from them.
Rose dashes out to the road, where she runs into Cybil again, having nearly missed death. Doubting the motive and sanity of Rose, Cybil arrests her under the suspicion of harming Sharon. With no vehicle in sight to drive them, Cybil and Rose begin to march out of the town and head to a literal dead end. Once again, the monsters appear, and Rose uses the distraction to escape from Cybil.
Meanwhile, the monster spits out poisonous ink on Cybil, and her helmet and jacket begin to fume. Cybil removes her helmet and throws her jacket to the ground. She brings out her pistol and begins to shoot the enemy.
Rose heads to the school to look for her daughter, where she learns of Alessa, the little girl accused of witchcraft by the entire town. Alessa leads Rose to the janitor Colin’s body. In the janitor’s mouth, she discovers a clue to Sharon’s location.
Rose is preparing to leave the school when she is pursued by a bunch of miners accompanied by flesh-eating insects. Cybil saves her, and she now feels that something is seriously wrong with this place.
While the duo is momentarily safe in the boiler room, they are attacked by a Pyramid headed demon who has managed to crack the door with his giant knife. Chris, along with some police officers, has arrived at Silent Hill. He believes Rose is nearby as he can smell her perfume.
At this point, we discover that Rose and Cybil are stuck in a parallel dimension. The Police make Chris leave Silent Hill as it’s not safe to stay in the town, which has been closed because of a fire burning underground.
Cybil and Rose, on the other hand, come upon a zealot who mumbles about how religion is the only way to escape the darkness that looms above them. They make their way to the motel where Rose thinks Sharon is hiding.
They come upon Dahlia once again, and Anna, the zealot, attacks her. Sharon has yet to be located, but Rose instead encounters Alessa. As dusk falls, the two accompany Anna into the church, where her cult is finding refuge. Pyramid Head annihilates Anna as she assaults Dahlia once again. Strangers are viewed with suspicion by the cult.
They make the decision to send Rose down under the pretence of assisting in the rescue of her daughter. Rose is once again saved by Cybil, who sends her underground, leaving her vulnerable to the cult. Rose ultimately meets Alessa underneath and learns about her daughter’s connection to the town’s terrible history.
Rose discovers that a group obsessed with the purity of faith would term a fatherless child born out of wedlock a spawn of the Devil. The elders committed acts of cruelty by attempting to burn the child at the stake and tricking her mother into letting them sacrifice her.
Out of the torment, Alessa cursed the whole town and created Sharon as the symbol of the light she once carried inside her. Now it is up to Rose to prevent Sharon from meeting the same fate as Alessa. At the beginning of the third act, once again, the board appears to remind us, “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” “Do you not know that the saints will judge the world?”
In the realm of video game adaptations, Silent Hill remains an untapped gem. It not only stayed true to the sources, but Director Christophe Gans was also a major fan of the game, which aided him in recreating the universe. Rose is drawn into the Otherworld of Silent Hill by the thread of Sharon.
From the time Rose wakes up after the collision, she is confronted with a town where it showers ashes, a town populated with horrible animals, and a world that questions Rose’s perception of reality. Along with Rose, Cybil doesn’t believe anything Rose said until she herself runs into these monsters. And none of them look anything like the evil spirits and demons we are used to seeing in movies like The Exorcist or The Conjuring.
Monsters in Lovecraft’s world are more like manifestations of your most illogical fears. They don’t possess you; instead, they assault you or cage you in a different zone. The latter is where Silent Hill’s dread rests. Fans of the game will notice that the film has undergone some changes. In the film, Harry, the male protagonist from the video game, transforms into Rose.
Even with the gender swap, the essence of the story remains about a parent searching for their missing daughter. In the game, Dahlia, Alessa’s mother, is the main villain, whereas, in the movie, she is a mother who is deceived into sacrificing her child to Christabella, the leader of a cult out on a witch hunt for those who don’t adhere to the purity of faith.
Despite a few plot changes, what made the movie intriguing to game aficionados were the opponents who appeared on screen straight from the video game. As he assaults Rose and Cybil, we are introduced to Pyramid Head. We learn how terrifying he really is when he literally rips Anna apart. Another notable appearance is that of the mummified nurses Rose encounters after Christabella sends her underground to meet the demon.
The film’s colour tones distinguish the parallel world of Silent Hill from Chris’s reality, in which he detects her presence due to her perfume but is unable to locate her. The colour grey dominates the screen as soon as Rose enters Silent Hill.
It’s a stark contrast to Brahms, which isn’t far from our dead village. Although Chris is looking for his wife and daughter, his primary purpose here is to give more information to the viewers. It is through him we get to know that Silent Hill is haunted. As he tries to gather more information about his daughter from the orphanage they adopted her from, we learn a little bit more about Alessa.
The spooky background soundtrack just adds to the atmosphere. Akira Yamaoka wrote the soundtrack for the film, which was based on the music from the video games. You’ll be transported back to the days when you used to play the game after seeing the film. What makes the film more creepier is that it was based on a true storey from Centralia, Pennsylvania. In 1962, the people of the mining town were getting ready to celebrate Memorial Day.
They thought it would be a neat idea to clean up with an old-fashioned garbage fire, so they lit up the town landfill. And it resulted in the fire losing control and spreading faster than wildfire, eventually reading the coal mine rendering the place inhabitable due to unhealthy amounts of carbon monoxide. The town in the flick is shut down to the public for a similar reason. When the cops, along with Chris, entered it, all of them were wearing masks to prevent them from inhaling the poisonous gas.
The film Silent Hill is mostly driven by powerful female characters. The devastated mother looking for her kid, the police officer who uses her bullets to kill monsters, the cult leader who indoctrinated an entire community, and the young girl who cursed the entire area that took away her innocence. At its core, Silent Hill is a story about a parent who is prepared to sacrifice everything to protect their child.
A 3D sequel was launched in the year 2012. Unfortunately, it failed to not only terrify the audience, but also to live up to the high expectations established by its predecessor. The storey, titled Revelation, picks up some years after the first storey.
Heather, a high school student, is our protagonist this time. She’s always moving schools with her father because she continues experiencing dreams in which she’s teleported to Silent Hill. Sean Bean once again reprises his role as a father to the child, but this time he gets kidnapped by the cult who only wants to lure his daughter into the town to sacrifice her to defeat Alessa once and for all.
Heather heads to Silent Hill, along with her friend Vincent. They do bring out the monsters from the game into the movie, but as there’s too much happening, the movie leaves you more confused than scared.
Whereas Silent Hill: Revelation flopped as a sequel, a relaunch based on the franchise’s Shattered Memories might be intriguing. The fact that it is a recreation of the previous game, with the original plot of Harry, the father looking for his daughter, makes this adaptation work.
Some familiar enemies and characters return, while others are presented for the first time. In this installment, the players interact with a therapist, whose various tests give the players insight into the monsters they are about to encounter. Following the success of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, an interactive Silent Hill Reboot set in the world of Shattered Memories, sounds amazing!
While the game received mixed reviews, its icy setting would be ideal for recreating the creepy and frigid mood of the original film. To improve the fear effect, favourite creatures from previous instalments of the franchise may be incorporated, and plotlines could be warped into something more terrible.
Silent Hill deserves a much better sequel than Revelation, and right now it is the perfect time to create that.