Silent Hill 2 - Will we ever see anything like it again?
In this video, I take a trip to everyone's favourite foggy town, Silent Hill. A true classic survival horror title, I do genuinely wonder if we'll ever see anything as impactful as #SilentHill2 again. Let's delve into the process behind #SilentHill2, and take a look at what inspired the team.
Links:
Silent Hill 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_...
Music By: Underbelly & Ty Master, LATASHA and Kwon
Produced by: Chris Kernaghan
Support: The darkness within our minds
#SilentHill2 was a genre defining moment for horror games, and in my humble opinion, it’s unlikely to be surpassed in its ability to convey a truly surreal world and the way in which it tackles difficult subject matter. Having received a letter from his presumed dead wife from Silent Hill, James, the protagonist, travels to the titular town to discover more about the origins of this letter. We eventually discover that Silent Hill represents the deteriorating mental state of James and his ongoing battle to overcome depression, and guilt, due to the passing of his wife. Aside from creatures hiding in the dense fog, the town is mostly deserted. Few characters exist, but of those that you do meet, all are battling their own demons much in the same way James is.
Complex, unsettling and disturbing. Not just a survival horror game then, but one that taps into the human psyche, a bold take on the fragility of our existence, and the existential fear we all have in common with one another.
Let’s take a look at some key influences that had a direct impact on the design and development of #SilentHill2, and ponder if we’ll ever come close to another game that takes significant steps forward in addressing difficult topics directly and symbolically.
Horror comes in many forms for many people, but to me, the most effective horror I’ve engaged with comes directly from us as humans. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time watching Takashi Miike movies such as Audition, Visitor Q and The Happiness of the Katakuris and while watching an interview with the always eclectic Miike, to paraphrase him, he determined his own real fears were never based on monsters hiding in the dark, or spiritual beings that haunt your home at night - but what humans are capable of and capable of doing to one another.
My admiration for Miike’s work coincided with the release of #SilentHill2, a game that's themes are very much juxtaposed with Miike’s ethos of fear from within, and yes, while is does contain an abundance of demonic creatures that James must tackle, it’s important to remember these are physical manifestations of James’ deep-rooted, latent fears and guilt.
What #SilentHill2 does so well, that few others games of that time really did, was produce an atmosphere of sinister macabre. The fog flows all around James, changing in levels of density, creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia and uncertainty as we try desperately to discover where a particular sound is coming from. Camera angles are used in such a way to really underpin this feeling of claustrophobia. In many other games, such camera angles would be considered a detriment to core gameplay, but in #SilentHill2, designers were given creative licence to make the player feel a marauding sense of surveillance. Who by? We don’t know. We just feel like we’re being observed, and that’s enough to uphold a sense of apprehension within us.
Other key elements of the game give rise to fear when we initially see things that make us uncomfortable, but they’re layered in such ambiguity that we can only react with our primal instinct. An excellent example of this is when we first meet the infamous Pyramid Head, a formidable antagonist that’s still hugely iconic to this day. He stands silently, doing nothing, except watch us from behind bars. Observing us, ominously. Even as a first time player, you know we’ll meet this executioner again, we just don’t know when. Will it be whenever I open this door, leading to the place Pyramid Head was just standing?
Much of what could be defined as eerie up to this point has had little to do with jump scares, but more to do with a combination of unsettling visual and audible subterfuge.
"In #SilentHill2, fear could be defined as what you don't see makes you afraid"- Imamura Akihiro - Producer, #SilentHill2
Akira Yamaoka has often been praised for his soundtrack, and rightly so, as it’s one of the few soundtracks I’ve listened to that adds to the foreboding atmosphere, and never subtracts from it. It never feels like a distraction, a perfect accompaniment, the embodiment of fear and what we see on the screen before us. Like Dario Argento’s Susperia or John Carpenters The Thing. Take this simple synthesized drone sound as you enter Silent Hill for the first time. Used sparingly throughout, and always at the right time, Silent Hill leans heavily into sound design.