Silent Hill

"This is art, like it or lump it"

The late 1990s were something of a golden period for video games, since it bridged the creative ingenuity of the 80s and early 90s (witness Alter Ego, Little Computer People, the Sierra games of yore, etc, etc) with the kinds of technical advances we would see in recent years, enabling many game creators to bring their visions and ideas to full fruition (a case in point being how rudimentary the first two Metal Gear games on the NES look compared to the Hollywoodised 3D fanfare of 1998's Metal Gear Solid on the PS1). In other words, not only did game creators have great ideas, they also now had the technology to amply realise them, and yet at the same time games as a medium were to still become the kind of fullblown business ventures they would eventually turn into; for all intents and purposes, game creators were free to "fulfil" their visions (so to speak, or write, whatever) without necessarily feeling the need to meet commercial or demographic targets; much the same way several Hollywood directors of the 1920s were more or less left to their own devices (D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille were basically avantgarde film-makers to start off with, before the Hollywood studio system took full shape), and in a way the evolution of video games as an art form can be compared to the manner in which cinema progressed, not just technically, but also how it came to be perceived in the public eye - cinema was rarely taken seriously when it was still in its infancy, and equally, anyone arguing in the 1990s that video games were an "art form" would have been laughed out of the room, in spite of the highly imaginative nature of games such as Final Fantasy VI; and yet this seems to become more and more of a mainstream opinion (I suspect the turning point came when Time magazine called GTA: Vice City a "work of art"; an euphemism that is not entirely unjustified, I hasten to add).

At any rate, while the period in question bore witness to numerous great games - Final Fantasy VII (still the greatest game ever created - and that is not an opinion, that's a fact, capiche?!), Final Fantasy VIII, aforementioned Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto, Half Life, Oddworld, Broken Sword, Vagrant Story, Tomb Raider 2, the Resident Evil games - it was the Silent Hill series which truly stood out and epitomised the whole spirit of imagination and creativity which marked that particular period, at least for me.

The first Silent Hill, released in 1999, was initially derided by many as a Resident Evil clone of sorts, possibly because of it being a horror game and also due to the nature of its game engine (ie. being a 3D third person adventurer/shooter), though really nothing could have been further from the truth. Whereas Resident Evil drew inspiration primarily from the George Romero zombie horror movies of yore, Silent Hill drew from a whole plethora of influences which were predominantly set in the realm of psychological horror - Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker - and turned out to be not only one of the best games ever created, but indeed one of the best horror narratives in history.

The premise of Silent Hill partly draws from another classic video game, the IMO underrated and H.R. Giger-designed Darkseed, and runs thus: Harry Mason takes his daughter Cheryl on holiday to the seaside resort town of Silent Hill, where they are involved in a car accident, and Harry, upon recovering, realises that his daughter has disappeared. Eventually he realises that nothing in Silent Hill is as it seems - the whole town is deserted, safe for a few monsters flying left, right and centre, and it snows in the middle of Summer. What's worse, the town itself seems to be engulfed by several layers of reality and seemingly and increasingly consumed by a parallel, altogether darker world (which eventually came to be dubbed by fans of the series as the Otherworld), where everything is just as in our world, except more... eerie. And dark. And scary. And nasty. And aaaah.

As Harry meanders inbetween these worlds and attempt to finds his daughter, you come to realise that the Otherworld slowly but surely threatens to engulf all of Silent Hill, and perhaps even the world at large. Or is it? Or is what we experiencing even real? Perhaps Harry is in a coma and is just dreaming the whole thing? The genius of Silent Hill's narrative, and partly where most of the confusion surrounding the storyline stemmed from, was that Harry himself is not the actual protagonist of the narrative, in spite of being the central character (there IS a difference); in fact, he is just as much in the dark about the goings-on in Silent Hill as we are, and this, in part, makes up for a large part of the scare factor, and arguably genius, in the game. We really have no idea what's going on, and it does take some cerebral acrobatics to figure it out, not necessarily due to any fault of our own, but because we are witnessing everything from an entirely innocent, outside perspective. That is not to say that the narrative is impossible to figure out - after eight years, I think I've pretty much grasped it - but it's a sign of intelligence and a certain degree of shrewdness on Konami's behalf that they were not scared to create a game with a narrative that is at once challenging and relies as much on us to figure things out as it does on any clues we may or may not be given, and probably also on our ability to grasp some of the references therein (and I'm not just talking - or writing, ugh - of the fact that all staff members at the local elementary school in the game are named after members of Sonic Youth).

Speaking of references, I cannot even begin to recite all the religious and mythological subtexts which Silent Hill draws on. As with the Final Fantasy games (which refer to pretty much everything from Christianity to Judaism to Shintoism to ancient Gaelic texts), the SH creators have really done their homework here, and there are numerous ones worth mentioning - there is Samael, the "baddie" of the game and the one seemingly, but not solely, responsible for the mess we find ourselves in, and whose mark increasingly appears all over town. Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, I've managed to discern that Samael derives from Talmudic lore and in Judaic mythology is referred to as the Angel Of Death, ie. a quasi-Satanic figure of sorts. Equally, the two worlds dominant in Silent Hill - the "foggy world" and the Otherworld, can be viewed as representing Purgatory (or Limbo) and Hell, respectively.

Aside from this, what really struck out for me (and which was wholly missing the recent Silent Hill movie, which I've been gracefully able to avoid mentioning thus far), was the experimental nature of the game, particularly the manner in which it played with the juxtaposition between image and sound. To this day, one of my favourite moments in video game history is the moment where we stand in a darkened public bathroom in Midwich Elementary School and, out of nowhere, hear a little girl crying. It absolutely scared the bejeezus out of me at the time, and does so still, eight years after. Equally, in the Otherworld, we enter the library and not only see mummified corpses lining the wall, but also hear this random knocking sound, once again from out of nowhere. While this does draw to some extent on classic horror movies like House On Haunted Hill (1959), the desired effect appears to be little more than an attempt to unsettle you, and as such it works beautifully.

In fact, the whole game encapsulates a myriad of weird and wonderful sound effects, not to mention a soundtrack, composed by Akira Yamaoka (these days viewed as a legend by many fans) that is regarded as one of the greatest in video game history, in spite, or even perhaps because, of an entire suite of songs in the middle which seems to consist of little more than eerie, industrial sounds, and I think it once again speaks for the imaginative and truly original nature of the game that its soundtrack drew as much inspiration from the likes of Einstuerzende Neubauten as it did from Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks and indeed much of Lynch's work in general having been another major influence on Silent Hill). And speaking (or writing, argh) of the use of sound in the game, I haven't even mentioned the WW2 siren which accompanies every change from the foggy world to the Otherworld and vice versa - a truly ingenious device, and I still haven't forgiven the makers of the SH movie for giving it a literal explanation. I much preferred it when its origins where left unexplained, when it was just there. Far, far, far scarier, and I suspect this dichotomy between the game and the movie illustrates where the true differences between good horror and great horror lie. The game, suffice to say, is the latter.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/17/08

Game Release: Silent Hill (EU, 08/01/99)