Silent Hill

Silent Hill (サイレントヒル) is the title of a survival horror video game franchise, produced by Konami. As of 2004 there are five games available (one available only in Japan), all of which were released to strong sales and critical acclaim. The Silent Hill games are distinguished from other games in the same genre, such as Resident Evil, in that the focus is far more on character, story, and atmosphere rather than action and violence. The games' story lines unfold like that of a film, and multiple resolutions are possible depending upon what decisions the player makes during gameplay. Often, the player is left to wonder whether or not a sequence in the game has actually occurred in reality.

Contents

1 What is Silent Hill? 2 Atmosphere 3 Film adaptation 4 Synopses 4.1 Silent Hill (1999) 4.1.1 Silent Hill Play Novel (2001) 4.2 Silent Hill 2 (2001) 4.3 Silent Hill 3 (2003) 4.4 Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004) 5 Silent Hill comic books 5.1 Silent Hill: Dying Inside (2004) 5.2 Silent Hill: Among the Damned (2004) 5.3 Silent Hill: Paint it Black (2005) 6 Inspirations and references 7 See also 8 External links

What is Silent Hill?

Silent Hill is a lakeside resort town in the United States (possibly in New England) that has become deserted and isolated from reality, shifting between this world and the "Otherworld", populated by fearsome monsters and demonic entities. In the third and fourth games, the horrors of Silent Hill have been "brought to" the games' protagonists, whereas in the first two games, the protagonists found themselves drawn to the town. In each game, players are required to uncover a complex mystery to explain why they are being haunted by Silent Hill's horrors. Thus the games have a primarily narrative basis, rather than being driven by action.

Silent Hill is portrayed in different ways in the various games. The enemies and environments all relate to the themes and plot of each game. The first game is focused on a cult in Silent Hill and their religious activities. The changes in the town are brought about by the awakening of some godly entity. The second game suggests that the town may be a metaphorical incarnation of a person's troubled psyche, or perhaps a kind of purgatory in which a person is judged for past sins. The third game continues the notion of the battles between good and evil forces, like the first installment, in religious overtones. There are a great deal of sexual metaphors that seem to derive from the protagonist's angst and fears. The fourth game is openly surreal in its depiction of environment relating to psyche.

Numerous fan forums and message boards have sprung up on the Internet in the years since the games' introduction, where the symbolism and themes in each game are enthusiastically discussed.

Atmosphere

The games' visual design has come in for strong praise, depicting dark, fog-enshrouded, decaying environments enhanced by chilling (and very sudden) sound effects. Composer Akira Yamaoka has provided atmospheric and emotional music for the series, which ranges from melancholy piano solos to heavy rock pieces. Many fans and reviewers have referred to the Silent Hill games as among the most frightening ever made.

Film adaptation

In 2003 a motion picture based on Silent Hill was announced, with French director Christophe Gans (The Brotherhood of the Wolf) attached. The movie has the working title of Silent Hill: Centralia and will involve a woman who takes her sick child to a faith healer, ending up in the town of Silent Hill. The location of the movie is set in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. Shooting commenced in April 2005 for a planned release in 2006.

The cast includes Radha Mitchell known to most audiences as the pilot, Fry, from Pitch Black and Sean Bean, known as Boromir in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and as agent 006 in the James Bond film, GoldenEye. Several characters from the games are also set to appear, including Cybil Bennett and Dahlia Gilespie.

Synopses

Silent Hill (1999)

Seven years ago Harry Mason and his wife found a baby by the road and adopted her as their own, naming her Cheryl. Though the wife soon passed away Harry Mason continued to love Cheryl as his own daughter.

At the start of the game we find Harry Mason and Cheryl going to the town resort of Old Silent Hill. Strange events occur before they have even entered the town. A cop on a motorbike drives past and only moments later Harry sees the bike lying by the side of the road and the cop is nowhere in sight. Soon afterwards a figure suddenly appears on the road, Harry turns the car and slides off the road. When he regains consciousness Harry discovers that Cheryl is missing and he finds himself in the midst of the evil slowly engulfing Silent Hill, "a world of someone's nightmarish delusions come to life."

Several easter eggs, hidden references and a large amount of pop-culture references can be found throughout the game. As an in-joke for horror fans, most of the town's streets in the first game are named after popular horror and suspense novelists, such as Ray Bradbury, Ira Levin, Robert Bloch, Dean Koontz and Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King). If you care to look carefully enough, the word "Redrum" can be seen written on a door in a street, referring directly to Stephen King's The Shining. Also, the names of three members of the band Sonic Youth appear on a faculty list at the school. There is also a silly UFO ending that Team Silent included in the first Silent Hill. This ending became so popular with fans that Team Silent included alternate UFO endings for both Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. The UFO endings seem to lampoon off of each other. It should be noted that the UFO ending for Silent Hill 2 is only available in the Xbox version, or the Greatest Hits version for the PS2 in the US. The UFO ending is intact for all other non-US versions of Silent Hill 2.

Silent Hill Play Novel (2001)

Released on Game Boy Advance only in Japan. The game featured a related and unrevealed plot in Silent Hill 1. An incomplete, visual translation can be found at Silent Hill Heaven (http://www.silenthillheaven.com/Site/SHpn/shpn-start.php) A plot guide detailing the Boy Spring Scenario, in which you play Andy who lives in the house next to Harry and Cheryl Mason, can be found at Gamefaqs (http://www.gamefaqs.com/).

Silent Hill 2 (2001)

Three years ago James Sunderland's wife Mary passed away from a terminal disease. James, still grief-stricken from the loss, receives a letter from his late wife asking him to meet her at their "special place" in Silent Hill. James finds the resort town replaced with a mist-shrouded hell full of crawling monsters. While searching the town's decrepit buildings for clues, James encounters other odd people, including a little girl who seems to know a great deal about James' and Mary's relationship, and a mysterious young woman named Maria who is the spitting image of Mary.

The Xbox version of the game, subtitled Restless Dreams (Inner Fears in Europe), featured an additional scenario where players controlled Maria. This level was included on the PlayStation 2 version when the "Greatest Hits" edition was released (also known as Platinum Edition). The title of the original scenario with James is called Letter from Silent Heaven. The one featuring Maria as the protagonist is named Born from a Wish. This scenario was also included in the Director's Cut version of the PC edition.

Silent Hill 2 does not have a direct narrative continuity to the first game, but shares locations with the third game, and a few allusions in Silent Hill 3. The fourth game expands upon some of the town's history as related herein.

Silent Hill 3 (2003)

Seventeen years have passed since the events of the first game. Heather is a normal teenage girl who loves to shop and has a sharp attitude about almost everything, but one Sunday the past catches up with her. Avoiding a stranger who claims that he is a detective, sent to find her, Heather suddenly finds the environment transformed into a strange decaying landscape. She attempts to escape the horror to her home and her father, yet on the way she faces a mysterious and forgotten secret.

The plot and locales of the third game are directly tied to the first Silent Hill.

Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

Henry Townshend, living in South Ashfield, a town neighboring Silent Hill, one day finds himself mysteriously locked in his own apartment. He cannot escape through either the windows or his front door, which has been chained shut from the inside. No one, not even people standing directly outside his front door, can hear him when he pounds on the door and cries for help (see reference to duality of reality, above). After five days of entrapment Henry finds a hole that has opened up in his bathroom wall. Armed only with a steel pipe that broke lose when the wall opened, he is about to venture into the hellish madness of Silent Hill.

This installment of the series features revised controls, modifications to the item menu and map, and segments that are played from a first-person perspective. The plot of the game expands upon the history of a serial killer mentioned in Silent Hill 2 and of the cult that seems to control the town.

However, Silent Hill 4 was not originally slated to be a Silent Hill game. The Silent Hill team of designers planned for it to be an original concept for an original game not affiliated with any other franchise. After the general pre-production of the game, Konami decided that launching a new franchise was too much of a marketing risk, and instead opted to convert the game to a Silent Hill title. The connections to the second Silent Hill game, including the story of the serial killer, were added when the game went into full production.

Silent Hill 4: The Room was released on September 7 2004.

Silent Hill comic books

A series of comic books written by Scott Ciencin with artwork by Ben Templesmith, Aadi Salman and Shaun Thomas published by IDW Publishing.

Silent Hill: Dying Inside (2004)

Released as five issues, with the first two dealing with a doctor and patient, while the final three cover a group of goth kids.

Silent Hill: Among the Damned (2004)

Concerns a soldier dealing with survivor's guilt.

Silent Hill: Paint it Black (2005)

In this we find an artist drawn to Silent Hill when he needs to find inspiration for his latest work.

Inspirations and references

This section is for trivia and speculation concerning the series, and contains spoilers.

• The movie Jacob's Ladder has much the same theme as Silent Hill 2 of a personal purgatory. The monsters in Silent Hill 3, with their heads jolting in strange ways, resemble that of the disfigured human-creatures in the movie. Another strong reference is the use of the name Bergen Street for the subway platform to which Heather, the main character, tries to make it in the game. Bergen Street station played a significant part in Jacob's Ladder and the setting looks very much alike.
• Much of the style of the first game's abandoned town setting is said to have been inspired by the movie Phantoms. The movie is based on the book Phantoms, which is written by horror novelist Dean Koontz; as noted above, one of the streets in the first Silent Hill is Koontz St.
• In Silent Hill 2 a sign mentioning Historic Route 26 is shown. Route 26 is located in the western mountain area of Maine on the New Hampshire border. The Scenic Byway is unique in that it connects with a New Hampshire Scenic Byway and passes through Grafton Notch State Park.
• In the liner notes of the Silent Hill 4 soundtrack an address is listed for the strip club Heaven's Night. That address is:

2121 Carroll St. South Vale, ME

• The cult series Twin Peaks is also supposed to have had an influence on many aspects of the games.
• A song in Silent Hill 3 is titled "Sickness Unto Foolish Death". This might be a reference to the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's theory on despair, which he wrote in his Sickness Unto Death (http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=2067), an existential concept to describe the state we're in when we have to make choices in a world of uncertainty. This state is the "loss of self." Looking at the third installment of the series with this theme in its context, it could be seen as Heather's difficult choice of vengeance vs. submission to the Otherworld of Silent Hill, and how she loses her self-awareness in the process of determined vengeance.
• One of the end songs in Silent Hill 2, "Angel's Thanatos", is most likely a reference to the Freudian idea of Thanatos. It is the desire to give up life and return to non-existence. As the song precedes the ending in which James commits suicide, it makes sense.
• Silent Hill's Incubus, at the end of Silent Hill 1, is visually based on Baphomet. Silent Hill 3 also contains references to Metatron, an angel detailed in the Kabbalah.
• A common misconception outside of Japan is that the angel Samael is the main antagonist in the first Silent Hill game. However, Samael is actually never involved in the incidents surrounding Silent Hill. In the first Silent Hill game, Dahlila lies about the Seal that Harry possesses and the various Marks found around the town, calling them the Mark of Samael. The Seal is in fact the Seal of Metatron (which reappears in Silent Hill 3). A poorly worded translation from Japanese to English at the end of Silent Hill also added to the confusion. The creatures that cause the disturbances in the first and third games are a physical manifestation of the god that a cult in Silent Hill worships (in the first game, the creature is named Incubus). The history of the cult and the god they worship is revealed in Silent Hill 3. Whether this creature exerts influence in Silent Hill 2 and 4 is debatable, but a Mark similar to those in Silent Hill 1 is present at the end of Silent Hill 2, suggesting that the god may play a role throughout the series.
• Wheelchairs are recurring features in the series. In Silent Hill 1 a boss, Cybil, is found lying in a wheelchair. At one point in Silent Hill 3, Heather passes a glass wall. On the other side is an empty wheelchair outside of a room in what appears to be a mental institute. This strongly resembles a prominent image in the movie Session 9. Another wheelchair can be found lying on the floor, its wheel still spinning, resembling a shot in Jacob's Ladder. In Silent Hill 4 the player is attacked by a wheelchair, which is an enemy which cannot be beaten. An empty wheelchair is also a recurring image in the film The Changeling.
• Throughout the series it becomes clear that there are 3 levels of reality in Silent Hill, like layers of skin or like scar tissue over a festering wound. The top level is where people live out their normal lives, and is not really any different to any other town. The next level down could be called 'Foggy' Silent Hill, where an all-pervading fog often obscures visibility to a matter of feet, similar to Stephen King's The Mist (a favorite story of one of the series' developers). Some monsters are apparent here, but by and large the town itself is much the same (the town, not the people). The third layer down, where the real corruption of the reality lies, can be called Dark Silent Hill. This darkness is not just a physical darkness, which is used to great effect to put the reader on edge, but also corresponds to the kinds of monsters found here. This Dark Silent Hill is the rotten core of the town, where the wound inflicted in the beginning continues to grow in power and enormous might.
• In Silent Hill 2, the hero finds himself pursued relentlessly by a monster he dubs "Pyramid Head". Pyramid head is a mute, seemingly invincible killer that, despite his slow skulking gait, always seems to be able to head off the hero at every turn. This is very similar to the character Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th (movie) series of horror films.

See also

• List of Silent Hill characters
• List of Silent Hill monsters

External links

• Silent Hill series official website (http://www.konamityo.com/silenthill/en/index.html)
• Official Silent Hill 2 site (http://www.silenthill2.de/) (Konami Europe)
• Official Silent Hill 3 site (http://www.konami-europe.com/silenthill3/) (Konami Europe)
• Official Silent Hill 3 site (http://www.sh2003.com/) (Konami Japan)
• Official Silent Hill 4 site (http://www.sh2004.com/) (Konami Japan)
• Gamespot's Silent Hill 4 site (http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/adventure/silenthill4theroom/index.html) - Previews, screenshots, movies, walkthroughs (Playstation 2)
• Translated Memories (http://www.translatedmemories.com/)-A tanslation of "Lost Memories" and "Another Crimson Tome", two books released only in Japan that contain information of the Silent Hill games.
• Nursery Cryme (http://www.nurserycryme.net/) - Files and general info on Silent Hill
• Silent Hill Forum (http://www.silenthillforum.co.uk/) - UK-based forum for the games
• Central Silent Hill (http://www.black-helix.com/) - A Silent Hill Wiki
• Silent Hill Heaven (http://www.silenthillheaven.com/) - Information and a Silent Hill forum
• Gamingredients Silent Hill coverage (http://gamingredients.com/issues/11/)
• Weird World of Silent Hill (http://wwosh.tripod.com) - Fan site
• Publisher of Silent Hill Comic Books (http://www.idwpublishing.com)
• Unauthorised fan-based Silent Hill movie trailer (http://www.meantimeprod.com/short_films/silent_hill_movie.html) (Quicktime)
• Petition to change the movie's title from Centralia to the original Silent Hill (http://www.petitiononline.com/shm45678/petition.html)
• Konami video clip about the Silent Hill movie (http://www.konami.co.jp/ja/tv/news/0572/br.html) (Japanese)
• Article concerning the progress of the movie (http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/index.php?Show=3424&Template=newsfull)pt:Silent Hill

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