Silent Hill. I’m sure this is a classic nostalgia for some folks reading this. You may have played the games even. I haven’t yet but I watched Silent Hill 2 as a teen and loved it so much I watched Silent Hill. In a nutshell, this is where my love for horror began and this was before I found Lovecraft.
Summary
I’ll be a little loose on these summaries for now.
Spoiler Warning: if you haven’t seen the movie, you may not want to read beyond the summary just yet. Save this article and return back later! If you don’t care then by all means read on viewer…
Silent Hill
Silent Hill is about a mother who takes her adopted daughter to an abandoned (but burning) mining town in the hopes that her nightmares will stop and she can finally rest. Along the way, she meets gets trapped in another world with several other Silent Hill townies and experiences their strange cult and the creatures that haunt them.
Silent Hill: Revelation
Continuing in her mother’s footsteps, the daughter now returns to Silent Hill where her mother disappeared and finds the truth behind her new friend (possibly boyfriend) and the new evil that is attempting to rise in place of the old.
Silent Hill in a nutshell
The plot is decent. I had so many flashbacks of younger me raving in fandom glory over this. Now that I’m older with experience in storytelling, I see the holes.
In Silent Hill, the mother is way to knowledgeable and can easily solve problems. In an odd way it compliments the story since these types of games do tend to give you items and problems to solve. So I won’t really complain on it too much. It’s really the only weakness of the whole movie. Things were just too easy for the mother to get in and get out.
Silent Hill: Revelation didn’t have that problem… kinda… It was a lot of ‘leading on’ with the main character. Meaning that the main character was lead to Silent Hill and she had a clear path straight to the climax with very few troubles. We do see a lot more creatures in this movie which is nice. It reminded me of game bosses which felt great and nostalgic for me! In a way the character’s did cause a lot of chaos but not enough trouble for me to feel like the character had to use a lot of skill and knowledge to overcome them. It was a lot of running and dodging.
We start with a problem that the mother is missing but we don’t see what happened to her. That is where a Silent Hill 3 should play in but it never did (to my knowledge). We also start with a dream which ends up showing in the climax.
Speaking of the climax, do you know how many times I played that carousel scene on repeat as a teen? Still did it too lol. However the carousel fight scene is pretty weak. Both girls hug each other to death and the daughter is the clear winner. As a teen I always found it lame even though I understood that there was a mental struggle.
How would I fix the carousel scene?
Show more action. Maybe hugging is the right motion but we’re not totally on Earth anymore. We’re in an alternative reality so there is room to stretch some things.
With psychic attaches and damage we still get some movement so more tumbling would have been nice. A physical attach from Alyssa (the alter ego of the daughter) would be nice too because she’s the one in charge of this realm. She has power so why shouldn’t she use it? Not using it makes her look week and left me asking why she was so easily defeated by the daughter in this movie vs not defeated by her in the original movie.
Long story short, add some real struggle. Visually show me the battle happening even though it’s more mental.
Does the old 2000 CGI show it’s age?
Kinda…
It’s not terrible but I can see it. I also grew up in the era of 2D animation when 3D was coming around so I know terrible CGI and 3D animation when I see it. For it’s age, it holds up pretty well.
Is pyramid head still awesome?!
Yes!!!!!!
Seeing Pyramid Head walk around on screen brought back memories of inspiration. In fact this whole movie reignited that inspiration I love with this type of horror. Technically I do have my own Pyramid Head in my oversized multiverse so I will be taking some inspiration for him.
I will say I still prefer Pyramid Head from Silent Hill: Revelation was better then the one from Silent Hill. For me, the bugs just didn’t go with the character so it was nice just to have him walk around in the second movie instead and play a larger roll. I still think his roll could have been larger since he’s the guardian of Alyssa but I won’t complain to much.
In conclusion
Defiantly worth watching for this Halloween. I’d add it to your line up this weekend and watch it before it leaves streaming services.