The original Silent Hill video game came out in 1999, and it is considered by some to be one of the best video games ever, enjoying a huge commercial success that would eventually lead to an entire franchise spanning other video games, movies, and graphic novels. The game is in third-person view, with real-time rendering of 3D environments. The protagonist of the game is an ‘everyman’, Harry Mason. This was a unique choice, as many video game protagonists typically have at least some combat experience. This is even the case in most of the following Silent Hill games.
The main premise of the game follows Mason as he searches for his adopted daughter lost in the town of Silent Hill. The style of the game is a psychological horror, and the people residing in the town worship a seemingly demonic cult, living alongside various monsters. The gameplay consists primarily of solving puzzles, exploration, and combat. It mostly stays within the third-person view, changing angles occasionally for dramatic effect. This is another aspect making it unique from the survival genre games that came before it, as they tended to switch camera angles often. The game results in Mason learning his daughter’s unsettling origin.
The game was made by the Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo development studio. Konami’s goal was to make a game that would be successful in the United States. The individuals selected for the task were a group of people who were actually considering leaving the company. They felt like they weren’t able to do what they wanted creatively, and many had failed at the previous projects they had been assigned to. But with Silent Hill, they were finally given freedom. They decided to make the game appeal to the player’s emotions, and so it took on the psychological theme. Working as a game director for the first time, Keiichiro Toyama, came up with the premise. He was inspired by supernatural ideas of aliens and witchcraft, as well as filmmaker David Lynch, known for Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive.
In 2006, the Silent Hill movie came out. It was directed by Christophe Gans, known to be a big fan of the video game, and inspired by elements from the first four Silent Hill games. The game begins with Mason’s drive to Silent Hill. At the edge of the town, he crashes the car and is knocked unconscious. When he wakes up, his daughter is gone, and he has to go and search for her.
This introduction is fairly similar to what happens in the film, only instead of Harry Mason, the lead is the girl’s mother, Rose Da Silva. However, the rest of the movie does not follow the plot of the game as closely as this scene does. By the time that the first Silent Hill movie came out in 2006, there were already four games out. Some might wonder if the movie did anything to inspire the four games in the main series that came out after its release, but it seems that it did little to influence them.
There are subtle things in the later games that could have been inspired by the movie, for example, in Silent Hill: Origins, released in 2007, actions within the dimension of the demonic Silent Hill world can affect things in other dimensions. In the film, Da Silva, like Mason, is trapped in one dimension. But where Mason’s wife is dead, Da Silva’s husband is alive in the real world. In the film, it doesn’t seem that anything done in one dimension has any effect on the other, but the idea that the two could coexist might have come from the film. Additionally, in this game, the protagonist has the ability to escape from monsters without harming himself or the monster, and it seems this is a skill that Da Silva has in the movie as well. To be fair, that likely is just a result of a film lead not being able to die and respawn in the way a video game character can.
In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, released in 2009, there is only one type of humanoid monster. This was an interesting choice because every other game has a variety of monsters. In the film, there is more than one monster, but significantly less than are portrayed in the games. Perhaps the game makers felt that since the movie had resonance with only a few monsters, they could potentially get away with just one. Although, the monsters in the game are intended to be a reflection of the protagonist’s own fears and issues, an important aspect that the film misses, and subsequently this game misses somewhat too.
It could have been difficult for the film to influence the games because the stories in the various Silent Hill games aren’t necessarily linked in the first place. Of the eight games in the main series, only the first and third really relate to each other, although the second game does reveal a small connection to these two at the very end. The key between them all is really just that they all take place in Silent Hill, and they all involve people battling with some sort of psychological issue.
Gans is said to have had the game set up on set so that the cast and crew could play while shooting, but despite this, critical reviews for the film weren’t great. Although the movie does seem to do a good job of creating the atmosphere present in the game. The original 1999 video game alone consists of about seven hours of gameplay, whereas the movie is just over two hours. The film can’t create the full experience of playing the game, but no movie really can. It’s like how a movie can never live up to the book it’s based on. Video games, books, and even real-world events can take huge amounts of context to really understand and appreciate, but a movie only has a few hours to say as much as it can. In light of this, Silent Hill is a decent video game adaptation, even if it didn’t do much to inspire the Silent Hill games that followed it.
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