Rambling Thought on Silent Hill Movies

So, a new Silent Hill movie is out. This isn’t a review of it, because I haven’t seen it and I don’t intend to. I was completely uninterested in the project from its conception, and nothing I’ve seen in the run-up to its release has made me any more interested; I thought the movie was probably going to be bad because it’s directed by the guy who directed the first one and that was bad, all the trailers and clips and photos looked bad, and I’m not that enamoured with the story of Silent Hill 2 to begin with.

It’s currently sitting at a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, which the Silent Hill fandom has met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but that fact hasn’t even elicited a shrug from me. The score could have been 70%, it could have been 100%, and my response would have been just as disinterested. No movie based directly on any of the Silent Hill games, not even one that’s by all measure a good movie in its own right, is ever going to give me what I want out of a live-action Silent Hill adaptation.

Yes, this is going to turn into fanfic where I describe my Ideal Perfect Silent Hill Adaptation. Feel free to jump ship now.

The curse of the video game adaptation has largely become a thing of the past, as we’ve seen a string of live-action projects (mostly in TV format, more on that later) that have managed to thread the needle between being reasonably faithful to the source material, and being accessible to newcomers, and winning over general audiences, and not entirely turning off fans of the original. The most notable of these is probably HBO’s The Last of Us series (at least the first season, I haven’t seen the second one but have heard very mixed things), but there have been others. I thought the Mario animated movie was disposable fluff, but it was competently made, didn’t descend into a barely-recognisable fever dream like the 90s film adaptation, and managed to tell a story using a cast of characters who have almost no personality in their original forms.

I’ve seen a lot of speculation on what lead to this sudden surge of decent-quality video game adaptations, mostly positing a phenomenon similar to the superhero movie boom: a few movies come out that do well and are received well by audiences, that convinces higher-calibre writers and directors and actors that these kinds of projects are worth their time, they make even better movies that make even more money, soon everyone in Hollywood wants to greenlight a video game movie. I do think that’s part of it, but there’s another major factor at play that’s unique to the sphere of video game adaptations, which is that the games themselves have changed.

Making video games more “cinematic” has been a major goal of AAA developers and publishers for almost three generations now, and it’s resulted in both good and bad things: on one hand we’ve gotten games with stunning production values and more sophisticated writing, on the other hand it’s contributed to over-inflated budgets, studio closures, mass layoffs, and ruinous working conditions for developers. And for better or worse, it’s also made video games much more amenable to being adapted into live-action movies or TV.

To go back to The Last of Us, its first season basically just stripped out 99% of the game’s exploration and combat, then strung what was left into a linear episode-by-episode narrative. Yes, there were changes made, some quite large, but in its basic structure the series is extremely faithful to the game it’s based on, with many key scenes basically being adapted word for word. Notably, when taking this approach the series didn’t have to cram in a huge amount of filler material to pad the story out into something that could take up eight episodes of full-length television. There was enough meat there already to work with.

Now take this same approach to Silent Hill 2, or any of the classic Silent Hill games. Take out all the exploration, all the monster combat, all the time spent reading notes and solving puzzles and opening your map to try and get your bearings. What you’re left with is a scant handful of fairly confusing story sequences which are—let’s be completely honest here—not exactly Shakespeare in terms of writing quality. Putting some of that gameplay back in to pad things out throws up more issues, since most of any given Silent Hill game consists of a single character wandering around an empty environment. Note that this is what the director of the first Silent Hill movie did, and many critics, even ones who had never played any of the games, complained that the resulting movie often felt like watching someone play a video game.

These issues have plagued every attempt to adapt survival horror games, which overwhelmingly spend their time building tension and dread by having the player character isolated. You could probably turn that faithfully into something very experimental like Skinamarink, but I don’t think that’s the kind of project most studios (or license holders, for that matter) would be interested in.

So, given that these issues are inherent to Silent Hill as a franchise, how would I go about adapting the games?

I wouldn’t. Adapt any of the games directly, I mean. My Ideal Perfect Silent Hill Adaptation (or IPSHA) would be based on the setting and lore of the games, it would adapt specific scenes, monsters and locations, but it wouldn’t follow the plot of any of the games directly.

Actually, first off, my IPSHA would be a TV/streaming series, not a movie. Preferably it would take the form of a one season “special event” series like the Twin Peaks revival, and it wouldn’t have a huge episode count, but it would get more breathing room than a movie would allow for. This is important, because I think in order to tell a good Silent Hill story in live action you would need to expand the scope beyond a single character getting trapped in Silent Hill and wandering around in the dark.

So, multiple people trapped in Silent Hill and wandering around in the dark? Nope, we’re not doing that, at least not at first. The IPSHA would mostly take place in the actual, “real” town of Silent Hill, the one that’s fully populated and not blanketed in fog. Forays into the fog world or the otherworld would be occasional episodes that characters would experience during key moments rather than long-term trips.

To a lot of Silent Hill fans this probably sounds like anathema, but I think it’s vital to making any adaptation work. The eerily empty version of Silent Hill is fantastic for a video game, where the vast majority of the game consists of the player exploring the environment themselves, but it’s a major obstacle for a story that’s going to rely on characters interacting with each other. I think you could have absolutely killer individual scenes or sequences set in the fog world or the otherworld, and my hypothetical IPSHA would, but as far as setting the whole thing there, it’s just a non-starter.

(If you want an illustration of this, my next post will be a review of a book that runs into exactly this issue).

What would the IPSHA be about? I’m not going to write out a full fan-treatment because those are cringe, but for an opening premise I’d probably have the protagonist be a person coming to Silent Hill to look for a friend or loved one who went missing there. Basically, instead of following the typical Silent Hill protagonist who drove into town and vanished into the fog world, we’re following someone trying to find out what happened to that person. This would let the main character, you know, have other people to talk to besides whatever weirdos happened to get stuck alongside them, and it means they could come across backstory clues and evidence in a more natural way than the supernatural forces of the town manifesting it for plot convenience.

This format eliminates a whole swathe of the problems inherent in trying to make a “faithful” Silent Hill adaptation. How do you incorporate the puzzles? You don’t, instead the characters interview people and do detective-esque things to gain information. How do you build interpersonal drama and all that? Easy, you’ve got a whole town full of normal (well, ‘normal’) people to work with. What actually happens moment to moment in the story? Whatever you want! The writer or writers don’t have to try and twist a format intended for solo exploration gameplay into something that can accommodate a character-driven plot.

What about the monsters? They’d be in the IPSHA, you can’t not have monsters, but I’d go very light with them, at least until the story’s climax. I’d take a similar approach to early Stranger Things, where the monsters are an occasional intrusion into the plot rather than a constant presence. Another good comparison point would be the encounters with Pennywise’s various forms in any of the It adaptations: something that the audience feels could happen at any time, but which doesn’t actually happen constantly. I would probably not have a whole lot of scenes, if any at all, of character successfully fighting and killing monsters. That’s the sort of thing that needs to be in a survival horror game as a gameplay necessity, but it’s not required in a TV series or movie, and anyone working on an IPSHA should think long and hard before including it.

As for the actual plot, I’d lean pretty heavily into the cult. Yes, the trendy position among Silent Hill enjoyers is that the cult stuff is unsophisticated and the real heart of the franchise is the deep, complex psychological symbolism of Silent Hill 2 (nurse have big titty because James is horny), but I think the cult aspect would form a decent backbone for a series. You don’t even necessarily need the cult to have any tangible connection to the supernatural; as I explained repeatedly in my epic franchise retrospective, it’s always been highly ambiguous in the games (well, the good games) as to what extent the Order is actually tapping into the kind of divine power it thinks it is, so you could have a cult stumbling across Silent Hill 2-esque psychological horror weirdness, mistaking it for something objective that they can worship/control, and causing problems for the characters as a result.

Who are we getting to work in this thing? For years the dream among the fandom has been a Silent Hill adaptation helmed by David Lynch. That’s obviously not going to happen now since the man is dead, but I’m not sure it would have actually been a good idea if he had ever been offered the job. Lynch’s horror sensibilities are perfect for Silent Hill, yes, but anyone who’s actually watched a lot of Lynch material will know that horror is only part of any of his projects, and it’s almost never the biggest part. I think there’s a strong chance a Lynch-helmed Silent Hill series would have included way more of his comedic and soap opera sensibilities than people would have expected.

By pick for showrunner would be Nick Antosca, the creator of Channel Zero, preferably with as many writers and directors who actually worked on the episodes as he could bring with him. That series is probably one of the most Silent Hill-esque live action productions ever made despite not aping any of the franchise’s aesthetic choices, and it notably excels at threading incursions of the supernatural into more grounded human drama, which is precisely the format I think a successful Silent Hill adaptation should take.

Will something like the IPSHA ever exist? Personally, I think there’s a decent chance that it will. The stature of the Silent Hill franchise has increased markedly in the last two years and shows no sign of slowing down, and that’s happening right at the beginning of what looks like a pretty big videogame adaptation boom. The conditions for a good, or at least interesting, Silent Hill project are all there. What I think needs to happen is for an “auteur” figure who has a lot of clout with studios or streaming platforms to become interested in the property and push to get a proper series or movie made, and that’s something that could occur at any time.