Mark Kermode famously denounced all video game films as “rubbish”. Harsh, but for 2008, when he made this claim, not entirely unfair. After all, by that point, the best of the bunch was the dumb but fun Mortal Kombat and the stylish but vacant Silent Hill. For some unknown reason, filmmakers felt that taking a video game meant ignoring everything literally and just botching the story. But who wants to see Max Payne without the neo-noir? Who wants to see Resident Evil without the Romero influence? And who would genuinely want to see Silent Hill without the subtext?
To the credit of Christophe Gans’ 2006 film, many people regard it fairly well. It’s standing in the game-to-movie pipeline borders on praised. But it’s like polishing a big pile of dog excrement— yes, it’s polished, but it’s still a pile of shit that used to be something of value. It’s harsh to say it, but three films down and cinema still doesn’t seem to know how to adapt Silent Hill.
For the uninformed, Silent Hill is a video game series released by Konami, and originally developed by Team Silent. The series which runs entries Silent Hill (1999), Silent Hill 2 (2001), Silent Hill 3 (2003), Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004), Silent Hill: Origins (2007), Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008), Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009), Silent Hill: Downpour (2012), Silent Hill f (2025) and the remake Silent Hill 2 (2025). There is also a new game coming soon: Silent Hill: Townfall.
The games follow an everyman—and interesting for a horror genre usually an actual man (save for 3 and f)—who finds themselves drawn to the titular town that is surrounded by snowlike ash, heavy fog, demonic creatures and a cult that seeks to preserve an ancient order. The town acts as an embodiment of something within the protagonist’s soul.
This should make for a compelling horror film, descending into a literal hell that is manifesting someone’s darker thoughts. The first game follows Harry Mason, an adoptive dad who loses his daughter after a car accident and seeks to find her. It’s compelling, not just for the objective horror of losing a child, but that a single dad is basically made to run from scary things—which is rare in the horror genre. It takes traditionally masculine ideas and flips them. But Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary chose to make the protagonist of the first film—which follows the same plot—a woman.
Now, to talk from a sociological perspective, a woman on her own in a horror setting does immediately make audiences fear for her safety; that’s fair. But what the game does so well is to make you see a traditional example of masculinity genuinely fear for his life. Gans was quoted as saying he changed the gender because Harry had feminine traits (apparently, loving your kid and not wanting to die is for girls, go figure).
The issue with the first film is that it almost gets it right. There was a lot of to-do made about how there was a TV set up with a PlayStation so Gans could play the game and match the visuals of the game to the film as he was making it—and the film does look like the game. But visuals will only get you so far. What Gans gets so wrong is that he forces fan-favourite monsters like Pyramid Head and the dark nurses into the narrative when they belong to Silent Hill 2. Now, Gans has made some half-hearted attempt to claim the film is about sexism, but there’s actually nothing in the narrative to supportive this, and in fact, he pandered to audiences by adding a boring subplot starring Sean Bean and Kim Coates running around empty buildings because the film needed more dudes.
The thing is, bogging down your enigmatic psycho-horror with a stand-around exposition dump in the third act is the opposite of scary. It’s boring. No matter how well-cast Jodelle Ferland is playing a scary demon child, Alice Krige going on and on about the backstory is boring. The mysteries at the heart of each Silent Hill, bolstered by their usual multiple endings (including funny ones involving a Shiba Inu), add a layer of haunting to the procession.
What’s even worse is that M.J. Bassett, a perfectly fine schlock-maestro director, misjudged what made Silent Hill 3 when using it as the basis for the second film, Silent Hill: Revelation (2012). The game itself was imperfect to start with, having been the result of producer notes, meaning the third game Team Silent was working on was scrapped at the eleventh hour in favour of returning to the narrative set up in the first. So, most of the development time and budget was already spent by the time it came to exploring what happens to a teenage Heather, away from daddy Harry and returning to the town. But the game does have charm. Drawing on themes of childhood trauma and returning to ideas of your life being controlled by religion is a good concept for a horror, and one that has only grown in the years since the game’s release.
Sadly, the 2012 film becomes this unfortunate mish-mash of trying to adapt a beloved—if flawed—game and trying to make a sequel to a movie that kind of botched the first game. So, Bassett’s film becomes lumbered with the ever-troublesome albatross of pleasing both camps. It’s not impossible to do both—look at what Mike Flanagan did with Doctor Sleep. He managed to adapt a book that was a sequel to a previous book, but also tie it into a film adaptation that was starkly different. So it can be done, but only if you have skill.
Revelation 3D has no skill. Despite a fairly stacked cast—Adelaide Clemens, Kit Harrington (in the midst of Game of Thrones mania), Sean Bean, Carrie-Anne Moss, Deborah Kara Unger and Malcolm McDowell all show up—there’s no cohesion to the narrative. Clemens and Harrington are going for YA romance in the mould of Twilight, Moss is treating it like it’s a heavy drama, and McDowell is going for camp.
It doesn’t help that any psychological intrigue is jettisoned in favour of poor attempts at 3D and really ropey CGI. The film is also horrifically paced, setting up the story for much of the runtime, then rushing to get it finished.
And this is the issue with the films of Silent Hill: they feel too preoccupied with recreating shots or monsters from the games that they fail to get what worked so well. This is made all the worse with Return to Silent Hill. In its original form, Silent Hill 2 is about one man, James Sunderland, trying to hide from his own guilt. His wife, Mary, died from a prolonged illness and at first, we, the audience, believe he is just a man pining for his lost love. But as the narrative progresses, we realise this is a man who blames himself. Pyramid Head isn’t a monster but his guilt coming to punish him like an emotional beast, the faceless nurses that move when he does are there to punish him for sexually objectifying other women as he waited for his wife to die.
His soul is in conflict, aching to move on but drawn to Hell once again because he knows he wasn’t the best he could be. Each creature is punishing him for not loving Mary “in sickness” as he had promised. It’s an incredibly human story for something so supernatural. People get sick, and while it’s hell for the sick person, it can be a burden to their loved ones who want the pain to leave the sick person, but also the burden to be released from them. Sadly, the film decides to try to take the blame away from James instead, by making the illness the result of an evil cult, and that he was a better man; the rough edges are sanded down to make him more palatable.
This appears to be the film series issue—Silent Hill is about your darkest moments consuming you, or the way your mind bends under the weight of guilt. Any of the entries would make for great films—Homecoming enters very dark territory towards its climax that flips traditional protagonist sympathy upside down, while Downpour asks you to put your sympathy into a man convicted of murder. But even in an age of intelligent horror, the series is too scared to go there.
Instead, what might be best for the film series is to move away from adapting the games—after all, the games are (save for one and three) anthological. The town appears to change, the evil shifts, and the protagonist alters each time. Instead, the films should adapt some of the promising-sounding games that didn’t get made at all.
Over the years, information about several came out that sounded appealing—Broken Covenant, about a Mexican priest hunting for his missing niece and having to perform holy rites to banish the evil, could be great (especially if you cast someone like Gael Garcia Bernal). Similarly, Cold Heart, which follows an emotionally damaged student who gets lost in a blizzard that brings to light her darkest secrets.
Perhaps the biggest coup would be to get Guillermo del Toro to bring his aborted Silent Hills game with Norman Reedus to the big screen. The biggest “what if” in gaming history could make for an impressive horror film, given that del Toro is a maestro at metaphorical horror, where monsters are more than just ghouls, and Reedus is still massively popular thanks to his The Walking Dead role as Darryl Dixon.
Despite awful reviews and poor box office, we will be re-re-returning to Silent Hill. It’s a matter of when not if, but it could be so much more than the rotten stinkers we keep getting given.
