Fat Ninja

I’ll be honest and tell you that I never beat Silent Hill 2 on the Xbox because the game gave me some serious heebie-jeebies. Going into it, I thought, “Hey, I’ve played Resident Evil and Silent Hill’s got nothin’ on Resident Evil.” I was sorely mistaken. Silent Hill offered a different brand of horror. Resident Evil served up your standard fare of zombies and such, and it mainly evoked an adrenaline-fuelled paranoia. While it certainly had me jumpy at times, it never really struck a lasting chord with me in terms of genuine fear. Silent Hill is another story altogether. Horrific creature design and acutely eerie environments plunged me into the darkest, dankest recesses of my mind and branded themselves into my subconcious. I would walk away from the game feeling very literally unsettled on a psychic level. Perhaps I’m just easily frightened, but it was for these reasons that I stopped playing Silent Hill 2.

Despite these facts, I was quite excited when I caught the initial trailers for a movie adaptation of Konami’s horrific journey through the cursed town of Silent Hill. This interest was further piqued when the film released and met with favorable reviews from the gaming community. I held off on catching it in the theater, opting instead to wait for the DVD release. So, I picked it up the other night and sat down to watch it after our anniversary dinner. Now, having played the game, you’d think that I’d be prepared for what the film had in store for me, especially since it had been applauded for its faithfulness to the source material. Well, I wasn’t; not even in the slightest.

The film opens up with some expositional elements, introducing us to Rose, Chris, and their troubled adopted daughter Sharon. Sharon, it appears, has a history of sleep-walking and violent nightmares. The couple’s efforts to combat their daughter’s afflictions through conventional means have met with little success, and when Rose notices references to a ghost town called Silent Hill in Sharon’s somnambulist ravings, she decides to take her there to find some answers. But when she’s knocked unconscious in an accident on the outskirts of Silent Hill, Rose wakes to find Sharon missing and quickly begins the search for her daughter and soon finds that her daughter may be the key to unravelling Silent Hill’s mysterious past.

In terms of artistic handling of the transition of Silent Hill from a game to a movie, I cannot commend the director enough. From the very moment that Rose awakes on the edge of Silent Hill, the film does a marvelous job of adhering to the mood and ambience of its source material. From the construction of the sets to the camera angles employed by director Christophe Gans, the film pays perfect homage to Konami’s twisted brand of horror. Even casting and wardrobe is handled with the utmost care and attention to detail. Gans seldom strays from the ornate blueprint offered by the source material, breaking convention with the likes of Uwe Boll. Whereas most adaptations of this nature tend to sacrifice a great deal of a game’s core story elements, Silent Hill carefully retraces many of the game’s tracks with well-placed footsteps.

Unfortunately, games aren’t necessarily designed to appeal to broad audiences. They are designed with the understanding that most gamers are better suited to handling abstract storylines and even more willing to forgive omissions and certain implausibilities. These attributes do not necessarily translate to the general movie-going populace, and even less to the movie review community. As such, when Silent Hill falters to provide a succinctly tangible raison d’etre, it alienates this audience. Such risk is the unavoidable onus that comes with the territory of adapting games to the big screen. Therefore, most similar endeavors usually opt to radically restructure crucial plot elements in order to better suit the picky palate of the larger demographic while alienating the smallest piece of the profits piechart; the gamers. In truth, this practice tends to muddle the narrative elements so much that neither group manages to find satisfaction in the experience.

With Silent Hill the tables have turned in favor of gamers, offering a very faithful interpretation of the popular gaming franchise. It makes no apologies to the larger audience as it pulls them through the esoteric machinations of its plot, dragging them kicking and screaming on a harrowing descent into the darkest corners of the human imagination; and my does it excel at doing just that. Overall, Silent Hill conveys a very palpable sense of horror throughout the telling of its tale in a rather unique way. Though it is suspenseful, Silent Hill really is at its best when it’s disturbing the utter hell out of you. There’s a kind of horrific beauty that accompanies the entirely gruesome cosmetics of the abominations and monstrosities that call Silent Hill home; some quality that holds your rapt attention in spite of your psyche’s frantic pleas to look away.

FINAL THOUGHTS
So unsettling is the experience of Silent Hill that it lingers for days, as your mind struggles desperately to process and purge the data. I know it sounds like a strike against the film when I say that, but it’s genuinely meant as the best compliment. I remember that Silent Hill 2 for the Xbox was never about being a simple thrill ride that one could just get off of. The developers went to great length to make sure that even if the experience became so intense that you had to turn it off, you still had to struggle to wash out the images branded into your imagination. The film duplicates this experience perfectly, and it’s these haunting echoes that reverberate through you on every level that make Silent Hill so incredibly unique. It is, in truth, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

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