Sunday Scaries: YOU’VE BEEN HERE FOR TWO DECADES

A consensus among gamers is that, in any debate on what deserves to be held up as the Greatest Videogame Storyline Of All Time™, Silent Hill 2 needs to be in the conversation. It’s easy to see why: the game unfolds a bleak, engrossing, and mature (for its time) plot about grief and guilt communicated not only through its writing, but also through visual storytelling and the interactive setting it places you in. It is not perfect – the depiction of Angela and Eddie’s traumas are a bit dated in hindsight, among other things – but for it to still be widely beloved as an exemplar of the potential for what video games can achieve as narrative art, a quarter-century after it first came out, is damned impressive.

Sadly, this proved to be the peak of the Silent Hill franchise, with Konami shortly after butting in to pressure Team Silent into dividing themselves up so they could stretch themselves thin between developing a direct sequel to the first game fleshing out the convoluted cult “lore” of the series that fans didn’t actually care all that much about and a more ambitious but divisive sequel that turned out to be their last project. Then they shut down the team and outsourced the license to western developers more interested in jump scares and cynical franchise callbacks than trying to reconstruct the spark of disturbed creativity that its original Japanese studio struck back in the late 90’s. As it turns out, mainstream video game studios are in the same denial about what generates great art with real staying power as movie studios are. Konami didn’t understand, or maybe didn’t care, that the reason why those first two games hit like a bomb on the survival horror genre is not in spite of the weirdos they assigned to the project because they weren’t succeeding in any other department, but precisely because they were odd misfits let loose to pursue whatever bizarre ideas they had. The moment it became a franchise, the moment Konami decided to standardize its tropes and most popular monsters, the magic of Silent Hill was lost.

But there will always be Silent Hill 2. Well, kinda. The original game is hard to come by these days, and Konami lost the completed source code when they tasked Hijinx Studios with developing the Silent Hill HD Collection, which is why that remaster looked and played like ass. But hey, Bloober Team put out a full remake of the game recently, with new lines of dialogue and a completely overhauled over-the-shoulder perspective style of gameplay as well! And it’s pretty decent, too! It reminds me of how shocked and disturbed I was when I discovered the original game all the way back in middle school. The remake itself did not do that, of course. Since I already played through the story and all. But still! A solid effort! It felt like the video game equivalent of classic movie re-releases with sharper picture quality and sound. So I am mostly okay with Bloober Team bringing this story back for a new generation (especially since they are not super-good at telling their own original stories).

A few months ago, some eagle-eyed fans discovered a revelation hidden in a secret message throughout new collectibles placed by the developers. Y’see, when you decode the hidden polaroid photos scattered throughout the town, you can piece together this:

What does that mean? Has James been wandering Silent Hill longer than he originally let on? Is the town trapping him in a time loop? I have a different theory, but first, let’s talk about how this relates to recent movie news, because it looks like Hollywood has decided to chase the Silent Hill 2 dragon as well. Christoph Gans has come back to the director’s chair for Return to Silent Hill, a direct adaptation of the classic video game with Jeremy Irvine starring as haunted widower James Sunderland and Hannah Emily Anderson playing the dual roles of Mary and Maria.

Here is the recently-unveiled teaser trailer:

First off, it’s nice to see “visionary director” Gans coming around to the idea that men can be the protagonists of horror movies, since the only reason why he gender-swapped the leading role of the first Silent Hill adaptation is because he thought expressing fear and vulnerability were “feminine emotions.” No, seriously, he actually said this in an interview and it’s why Sean Bean does literally nothing in that movie. Because being scared is apparently something only girly girls do. But on a more serious note, there’s something… bittersweet, about the existence of this movie coming out so soon after the Bloober Team remake. I love the original Silent Hill 2, but I love it because it prioritized story and atmosphere to a degree that I had never experienced in a video game before. The success of a game that jettisoned the complicated mythology of ancient eldritch deities and secretive cults in favor of character-driven emotional storytelling should have motivated future installments in the franchise, both video games and movie adaptations, to just keep pushing in that direction in the same setting. And yet, it seems like no one in charge of continuing this series has been interested in doing that. They either double-down on the silly canon established in the first game, settle for fanservice, or try to recreate the trauma and guilt themes but being too scared of actually committing to difficult moral choices. Or they just hand the player a checklist and say, “Here’s a psychological profile questionnaire, just tell us how you want to be scared.”

For over two decades we’ve been going back to Silent Hill 2. Celebrating it. Analyzing it. Taking pieces from it to stick into the movies even though they make no sense outside the context of that game. Remaking it. But never trying to just do what the original Team Silent did to make it a classic in the first place. I think that’s the real meaning of “YOU’VE BEEN HERE FOR TWO DECADES.” The message isn’t for James. It’s for us. It’s telling us how long we’ve been in this loop, endlessly repeating James’ cycle of guilt, trying to recreate that sense of discovery we first felt back in 2001.

It’s a hopeless, impossible goal. But I haven’t yet figured out if this is such a bad thing. Obviously, I would prefer the next Silent Hill 2 over another Silent Hill 2, but a culture that recognizes and perpetuates Silent Hill 2 in some form might be the next best thing. One of the most oft-repeated criticisms of video game culture is how little it preserves its classics. An artistic medium that does not value its history does not value itself. Gamers will never convince anyone that video games are art if they cannot demonstrate that even the best of their artform is worth remembering and cherishing past two to three years. Maybe, by investing so much capital and manhours into preserving James Sunderland’s descent into hell, both through a video game remake and movie adaptation, we are looking at a corrective to this trend. And maybe, by being reminded of what made Silent Hill 2 so special, game developers can be inspired to actually make the next Silent Hill 2 in the near future.

Who knows, maybe Silent Hill f can accomplish this. That’s coming out this month, right?