Silent Hill: What did you think?

Cafe Society
1

I watched the movie Silent Hill last night with my husband and couldn’t understand the draw. After watching it, my husband commented, “You know, after this movie, I think I’ve decided I don’t like horror movies.”

I actually like horror movies, but I far prefer them without all the gore. I think they’re actually far scarier that way. Also, I didn’t really get the ending.

Anyway, if you’ve seen this movie and liked it, could you tell me why? Does it have anything to do with the video game? Did you like it as a film independent from the game? And if so, what about it did you like?

2

Hard to follow and depressing. Not much entertainment there. I never played the game but am a gamer.

3

The beginning when she was running around the town was very spot-on for the games, though I’ve not played all of them. They can be very spooky, but there was something missing from the movie. Effects were quite true to the game.

What about the plot did you not understand? I thought I got it, maybe I can clear it up? Not trying to be snarky.

4

I both like horror movies and am very easily scared by them, so my opinion of a horror movie is worth next to nothing since I’ll be freaked out by anything.

I found the Silent Hill movie disturbing with the whole adults-cooking-a-little-girl-because-she-was-supposedly-evil thing, but it had a more overtly scary vibe than the games. The games are scary because you’re waiting for something to happen, the movie just goes ahead and shows you. I’m still confused about what one has to do to get to the scary Silent Hill as opposed to the normal one the protagonist’s husband was in. I think Scary Silent Hill is like hell, and Sharon and her mother died in the car accident, but I’m pretty sure there’s a more in-depth explanation than that.

All in all, I didn’t really like it, certainly not enough to want to watch it again.

5

I really had trouble with the ending of the film. There was no explanation about what happened and why - it just…did.

I put my questions about the end in a spoiler in the event someone out there wants to see the movie.

My main beef with it was that, while I don’t expect there to be a happy ending, there was no real closure explaining why they remained in the alternate reality. Was it because of what the mother did letting the bad part of Alessa join with her? Was it because the little girl looked at Alessa? And why would the mom agree to get Alessa’s revenge for her if the potential outcome was that neither she nor her daughter would ever see the husband/dad again? And when they got home, why were they ok with that?

Thanks for the offer for clarification, Love Rhombus.

I also thought there was just too much unnecessary gore. The bits they did with the barbed wire and everything all oozy and drippy was a bit much for me. Even during the bits I had my eyes covered (yes, I’m a total weenie), I could hear this squelching.

And what was with the guy with the pyramid head and gigantic knife? Who the heck was he and what was with all the roaches that followed him around? Was he some sort of minion for Alessa? And why did Alessa trap all the nurses?

6

I like the movie quite a lot, and it’s one of the few I own on DVD. I’ve never played the game, but I love the creepiness of the movie. The gory scene towards the end is over the top, but I like it otherwise.

You said you don’t get the end?

[spoiler]It ends the way it does, with the husband not being able to see them when they get home because Rose and Sharon are dead. They, along with Cybil, did not survive much past the accident a few minutes into the movie. All the events in Silent Hill are like being in Limbo or Purgatory, which they escape but they’re still dead and he’s not. They don’t seem to realize that they’re dead yet.

Or, if the rabid fanwanks at imdb are to believed, they’re not dead but Rose is trapped in Dark Alessa’s world still (and Sharon’s body has been possessed bt Alessa) only having been allowed to think they’ve escaped. [/spoiler]

Honestly, I like the fact that it’s left ambigious. There’s a sequel coming out next year, and perhaps it’ll clear things up.

7

Maybe a stupid question but…

what the hell was the thing with the triangle head - did they ever explain that?

8

That’s Pyramidhead. A very scary character from the game. Basically, all these critters were expressions of Alessa’s battered, damaged, tormented sexuality. Frozen and warped by years of torment, her new adolescent sexuality had fragmented into a wide range of highly disturbed parts. As I understand it, Pyramidhead was her reaction to being dominated and subjugated for all that time. Her psyche lashed out and created PH, who is essentially an unstoppable force, absolutely subjugating and violating anything it came into contact with.

Correct me if I have the mythology wrong or confused. It’s been a long while since I saw the movie or read up on the iconography.

9

I only saw it once in the theaters, but overall I enjoyed it. Among friends, we say that it’s one of the best video game movie ever made, but not a good movie overall, so we realize it’s a guilty pleasure.

That said, I did find the ending extremely unsatisfying. I didn’t know there was a sequel coming out, but I’m not sure I can see that working for me. I have not played any of the games myself, but I hang around a geeky crowd where Silent Hill is revered as one of the best series ever, and I was exposed to a lot of talk about it when it came out (for instance, one of my friends is a metalworker who made his own Pyramidhead costume for Halloween and his wife went as a nurse - that’s how obsessed they were). So I pretty much knew what the games were about and the movie wasn’t that hard to follow for me.

To me, the movie was more about atmosphere than pure horror. It was a town where so many evil things had happened over the years, evil pretty much seethed from its pores in all sorts of bizarre ways. I thought it was really consistently creepy, I liked most of the characters, and it spurred my imagination on later thinking about it. However, I don’t watch horror movies at all, so I don’t have a lot to base its level of creepy on. Compared to other scary movies, this might have been pretty tame, but it worked for me. I’d watch it again if someone wanted to see it, but I wouldn’t seek it out.

10

Thanks for all the responses so far. You guys have really cleared some things up for me.

And Euryphaessa, I didn’t totally get why they all thought the little girl was a witchin the first place, either. I mean, even before the rape which was supposedly her fault, she didn’t do anything in particular during those flashbacks that would make one suppose that she was a witch or somehow evil.

I think that’s a good assumption a couple of Dopers have made that they were both dead at that point - it’d certainly explain how the mom and little girl slipped into the alternate reality while the dad and sheriff didn’t.

11

What I didn’t like about it was she would be menaced by these various forms and then they would just give up and let her move on. It wasn’t like in a game where you would do something to defeat that “level” and keep going. She would face certain destruction and then it would just leave.

12

In the first video game, the idea was that the burned girl was a sacrifice to attempt to bring about the rebirth of an evil god in the world, who was to emerge from within her. Something went wrong and the soul split in two, with the one half calling to the other the whole time. I don’t think there was anything about witchcraft per se or torture (well, barring that whole burning thing!) in the game.

13

Silent Hill was pretty terrible. Don’t judge all horror movies by that standard.

See Mulberry Street, and get back to us.

14

Meh, it was okay. I only watched the whole thing because it was filmed in Brantford, Ontario where my husband is from, so it was neat recognizing the places downtown.

15

I tend to avoid anything to do with the horror/suspense genre and only make exceptions for exquisite works of art (for example, Pan’s Labyrinth, while disturbing, is an excellent film I will never, ever watch again.)

The draw of Silent Hill the movie is that the video games were absolutely incredible, beautiful, atmospheric masterpieces. They aren’t so much gory as incredibly suspenseful. They take horror clishes (The Hospital, The Cult) and teach you why they became clishes in the first place. Silent Hill 2 (IIRC) starts you out with a 2x4 full of nails as your weapon, on some darkened path full of silence. Your job is to uncover the mystery. The game isn’t a hack and slash, but full of rarely appearing, symbolically disfigured creatures that show up, not with malice but with almost a kind of desperate horror. In 2 (I believe) you are equipped with a radio that crackles whenever one of them is near. Want to know the most horrifying sound in the world? A crackling radio. You then spend the next several seconds frantically searching the fog and darkness until you see it, limping toward you, almost imploring in the manner it attacks. You shoot at it, but since you’re not trained in firearms, you’re a shitty aim. You have to shoot at it like five times before you hit it. You feel sorry for it when it dies.

You find a building. 9 rooms behind every 10 doors you open are filled with nothing that can hurt you. Each room is a unique, macabre masterpiece. Sometimes things fall off shelves for no reason. Underneath all the subtext is a mystery that you have to uncover by exploring fantastically frightening environments. Enter a bathroom and hear a little girl sobbing. As you approach, she pounds on the stall door, begging you to let her out.

[SPOILER]You open the door (after about five minutes of soul-searching) and you find a box with five locks on it. You get a shitty blood-stained map to run around three levels of increasing horror. Exciting things happen. You find your five keys. Three hours later, you go back to the bathroom, triumphantly unlock your box, and find…

a single hair.[/SPOILER]

The puzzle element to the game is as surreal as the graphics.

You also find completely random, useless, inexplicable things such as

a lightbulb in a can.

Here is a YouTube cutscene [with SPOILERS] for, in my opinion, the weakest Silent Hill game. Skip the spoiler exposition and watch the atmospheric transition at 3:00. If that completely not gory scene doesn’t make you shit your pants, you are a fearless god. I have to be honest with you, I had to stop watching at 4:30.

I’m a complete coward about this stuff, and I actually haven’t played the game myself… I’ve just watched with rapt attention as my husband played through all four of them. It’s easy enough to egg someone on from the passenger seat, but the moment you have that controller in your hands it’s your ass on the line. I played for 20 minutes. During those twenty minutes, I probably took twenty steps. I was terrified to take more. For Silent Hill 2, my husband had to stop once dusk fell. He is not easily perturbed, but he refused to even talk about the game once we were in bed that night.

Which brings me to the movie. If you played through all four of these brilliant games and saw a trailer with the this screenshot, a guy you know well, a guy you spent half a goddamn game trying to hunt down, you would piss your pants with glee.

Sadly, the movie wasn’t anywhere near as good as the game, but it is honestly much more enjoyable if you played the games. Most nonplayers who watched the movie left the theater muttering, ‘‘What the fuck just happened?’’ If you played the game, at least you grasp the plot. I was also pretty satisfied just for that scene with Pyramid Head, one of the most badass game bosses ever created.

16

Love horror movies, didn’t play the game, and had friends just raving about SH. We watched it, rewatched the beginning because I was sure we skipped a scene, then just sat there thinking wtf?
It had some creepy scenes, but they didn’t seem to run with it. Instead there was immediately another unscary monster. Much of the acting was very made-for-Sci-Fi-Channel-movie acting (except Sean Bean).

17

I saw the movie before I actually played any of the games. Since then, I’ve played SH 1, 2, and 3. The movie is confusing and ambiguous, but the games are as well. There isn’t even a consensus among fans about what is “real” in Silent Hill and what isn’t. The authors of the games deliberately do nothing to really clarify what’s going on.
The only thing that seems to be for sure is that Silent Hill is a Bad Place. You can make a pretty good case that the characters aren’t experiencing the same realities. Are they just hallucinating everything? Are there “monsters?” Does the town transform or are the characters going somewhere else? The cult exists/ed, but does their god really exist and is s/he behind all this, or is that just a part of the insanity of the characters?
There’re endless pages of debate about the nature of Silent Hill and the things that may (or may not) happen there. One thing is for sure; if the place was real I’d disappear into the fog and ya’ll would never see me again.

18

The games were about creating an “atmosphere of dread”. There is blood, to be sure, and a certain amount of stuff jumping out of the shadows to shock you, but for the most part the games try to make you feel unbalanced and uneasy, until you’re constantly saying to yourself, “I’m not really sure if I want to see what’s in there.”

The bit in the game that freaked me out the most was in a bathroom in Toluca Prison, in SH2. It’s a simple setup, small bathroom, only two stalls. The door in the last stall is closed. You knock. “No answer.” So…

you walk back to the door to leave. When you reach the exit door, you hear a quick sort of scuffling WHUMP, like something heavy being thrown against the door of that last stall. And that’s all. But in your mind, you’re going, “Oh god, I’m in here with something horrible!” But you never see it. The door doesn’t open, and it doesn’t happen again.

Little scenes like that just put you on edge. It’s a nice, dreadful, creeping sort of fear.

The movie was above average, in my opinion, though not perfect. I though they did an excellent job of capturing the visuals, though, creating the “look and feel”. They even went so far, I noticed in several scenes, of recreating the overhead off-kilter camera angles you get in the game. And Pyramid Head looked great. The game designers apparently said of him that the “pyramid” was supposed to look like it was painful to wear, and it sure looks painful to me.

19

I thought that but it seems to me that the cops in the real world would have found the bodies at some point.

I’m not big on horror films or movies based on videogames and I never played the SH games, but I found Silent Hill pretty creepy as a film. Abandoned towns sitting on top of a coal mine fire with a spooky air raid siren going off in the distance every so often are pretty fucking creepy.