[originally posted at my blog, Lo-Ammi, and pictures from the Book of Lost Memories taken from the site Translated Memories]
I’ve had a craving to play some Silent Hill recently, which was particularly maddening since I have my PS2 packed away. Between this and always having a few choice Akira Yamaoka tracks on my iPod, I got to thinking about the Silent Hill movie and how I think a Silent Hill movie should be done.
First, the cast needs to be small. Look at how many characters appear in the first three Silent Hill games: 18. Admittedly, the Silent Hill movie only has 7 character, there are many more extras that appear in the movie. Isolation is a big thing in Silent Hill – the horror comes from the fact that you’re on your own most the time. It’s somewhat rare to come across another character – in fact it’s a reward for the player – and you only spend a little time with them each time you encounter them.
This leads me to an issue I feel is pretty big: how is the town is depicted. The movie got the town’s foggy and otherworld looks correct, but the town was merely a setting in the movie. Silent Hill is more than a town in the games. One can think of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly or the Ju-On/The Grudge series as to how the town should be depicted. In The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly the wild west setting is what makes the events possible; it’s not merely where events happen, but it’s the time and place in history where the events could happen. The wilderness the three main characters live in is not a set-piece, it’s bigger than the characters themselves. In the Ju-On movies the house is not some haunted house, it’s almost a character. It calls and attracts people to their doom. It seeks to perpetuate the curse. Silent Hill needs to be a synthesis of these two sorts of settings. Silent Hill is inherently bigger than anyone that enters the town and it seems to act as a force that not only allow the events we see to happen, but causes them on some level.
It's not unheard to turn a setting into a character in the horror genre
When the role of tarot cards within the series is discussed, Pyramid Head is discussed within the context of the judgement card. How the (in)famous monster is discussed shows that the town of Silent Hill took something from its history to satisfy James’ need for judgement and punishment. On the character of Maria, the same theme comes up: Maria is both a representation of James’ crime and a real part of the town’s history. The foggy and otherworldly incarnations of Silent Hill are not just a hellish resort town, but a character unto itself – this is a town that called Cheryl and the entire cast of Silent Hill 2 (excluding Laura), and is also capable of being exploited and used (such as we see with Claudia bringing the otherworld to the shopping mall in Silent Hill 3).
I would go as far as to say that a good Silent Hill movie needs to be about the town more than the people. The main character of a Silent Hill game is primarily the vehicle in which the player explores the town and its history. The protagonist is mostly ignorant about the town and is lost in the insanity of the situation, like the player is. The main character has a motivation to explain why they press forward with such determination despite the happenings, but the motivation is something that the viewer needs to be able to explain in very simple terms. What’s Harry’s motivation in the first game? To find and save his daughter. What’s James’ motivation in the sequel? To find the wife he thought dead. What’s Heather’s motivation in Silent Hill 3? To avenge the death of her father. The games waste no time is throwing the player into the hellish situations. In Silent Hill 2 we’re just given a brief monologue. Heather’s motivation in Silent Hill 3 is introduced after the player has played the game for a while – after they’ve made their way home from the mall which Claudia has corrupted. However, even then we just have a short cutscene to show us why she’ll go to Silent Hill, why she’ll do as Claudia wants in order to hurt her.
Even the film had the good sense to use the iconic music of Akira Yamaoka!
I think the best way to set-up a character’s motivations, in the context of a Silent Hill movie, would be the use of a credit sequence montage or something similar. Imagine a theme sequence using Promise (Reprise) from Silent Hill 2 in a movie that’s inspired by the original game: the title appears on screen over a black background; it fades to coffee table with photos strewn all over the place of the protagonist, wife, and child, each photo has the date in the corner and appears to be taken from a film camera; photos show them adopting the child, first time the child is at home, and so on; among the photos is the young girls birth certificate, no mention of parentage is on it, but there is other relevant information (if you want to explain how this information is available and correct, you can use a Travis-like character); the camera pans and we see a newspaper clipping, it’s an obituary for the wife; we then see drawings that somehow relate to Silent Hill; the camera zooms out and the father is watching a recent home movie and, for a frame or two, the face of the girl he adopted changes from her own face to the face of an older girl (Alessa), he keeps watching this clip several times, rewinding to review it, but there’s no other attention drawn to this subliminal change; and finally we see him pick up some car keys and leave the room. While this plays there’s no text displayed on screen. The movie then starts in a similar way that the original game starts, with the character waking up in his car after a car accident.
This sort of thing would manage to communicate the motivations of the main character without the use of dialogue. We sometimes forget that movies are a visual medium – they need not be plays with the possibility of big explosions. Movies, as a result, are perfectly suited to tell us all we need to know about a situation with the use of well-selected images. This more subtle approach can also lead to some narrative choices that can foster mysteries. Imagine our father-character, while exploring the famous Silent Hill health facilities, finding a document about Alessa and the document mentions when she was hospitalized – it happens to be the date of birth of his adopted daughter – but there is no attempt to point out this connection other than showing the audience the document he is reading. This would allow the observant viewer to go back and piece the entire narrative together for himself. In fact, this sort of story telling is essential. Part of the appeal of the Silent Hill stories is they invariably feel like we’re a bit left in the dark. When the story is done there should be aspects that are ambiguous enough that the viewer can expand on either by themselves or through the fandom.
The town of Silent Hill is no stranger to insanity
Additionally, a good and faithful adaptation must focus running themes of the games: love and sanity.
The protagonist and antagonist should somehow embody something about love. In Silent Hill you had the love Harry felt for his adopted daughter standing in opposition to the lack of love her own biological mother felt. In Silent Hill 2, James embodies two similar extremes. One part of him loved his wife enough to follow her into hell just to see her again – Laura parallels this side of him (and some suggest that she is another hallucination on his part, which makes sense on a few levels). Another part of him was selfish and full of self-love, as seen with the revelation that James killed Mary because he couldn’t handle nursing her (the In Water ending makes it clear that he didn’t do it to ease her suffering). In Silent Hill 3 it is Heather’s love for Harry that causes her to go to Silent Hill to seek revenge, Claudia’s love for Alessa is the driving force of her character, and the game draws the contrast between the father-daughter relationships that Claudia and Heather were a part of. Love may not be the most unique theme, but it’s a powerful way to get the audience to connect with the action, to connect with some characters and to despise others.
The supernatural and horror elements that the series is known for also goes hand-in-hand with the question of sanity. This is most notable in Silent Hill 2, where pretty much every character is, in some way, struggling with their pasts which have driven them mad. Who can forget the line in Silent Hill 3 where Vincent says to Heather, “they look like monsters to you!” What could that mean, is Heather hallucinating? Perhaps it’s just Vincent committing a nice little mindfuck on both you and your avatar. Either way, the events throughout the film shouldn’t be assumed to be truth. The supernatural must have elements of it that imply psychosis. By the end of it, we shouldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t.
I love him too, but I don't want to see him unless a character like James somehow figures into the plot!
Finally, Pyramid Head shouldn’t be shoehorned into the story. That monster maybe iconic, but it makes very little sense to have him show up and wreck shit if he isn’t a character’s manifestation of their own guilt. The purpose of this creature is not even some subtle metaphor to be divined – James Sunderland realizes this himself and it a pretty climatic moment in the game.
Until this happens, perhaps you should just go and watch Jacob’s Ladder. This classic is not just an inspiration to the games, but also quite a bit better than the Silent Hill movie we got.
