Halloween Countdown: October 22 – finding Cheryl

I’ve had a special fondness for the Silent Hill series of games from the moment I first tried the demo version of the first Silent Hill that came bundled with an issue of Official Playstation Magazine. The Resident Evil games, while fun to play, were strictly b-movie material thematically; its playbook familiar to anyone with the most passing knowledge of modern horror clichés -- a bio-engineered virus creates killer zombies and mutant animals.

The RE games do have some suspenseful moments, and are certainly fun to play, but the ground rules are too familiar, tapping the well-mined vein of zombie fiction conventions, that there’s not a lot of horror to be found. In William Paul’s excellent analysis of the “grossout” genre, Laughing, Screaming, he notes that the effectiveness of the original Night of the Living Dead movie stemmed initially from the audiences’ unfamiliarity with the nature of the monsters depicted onscreen. The lore of past cinematic bogeymen and their weaknesses (fire, stake through the heart, silver bullets) did not apply to this new breed of undead, and George Romero was able to exploit his audience’s ignorance to the fullest. (Case in point: The infectiousness of a zombie bite, something today’s audiences have been conditioned to expect, was not revealed until the latter part of the original movie.)

That feeling of being set adrift without any frame of reference in a world upended was perfectly captured in the first Silent Hill game. The transitions between a fogbound and monster-infested city (inspired, I assume, by Stephen King’s novella, “The Mist”) and a nightmarish otherworld of rusted metal, bloodstains, and flayed corpses used as décor, are unsettling and not explained until the very end of the game. The fluid nature of its reality defies rationalization, preventing the player from achieving a sense of equilibrium and thus heightening the overall sense of unease.

The game’s soundtrack, composed by Akira Yamaoka, meshes perfectly with Silent Hill’s relentless and disturbing visual elements. Somber, melodic tracks like the opening theme, “Silent Hill,” alternate with uncompromising audio assaults such as “Ain’t Gonna Rain”. It’s not the easiest album to listen to, but one of the best import soundtrack purchases I’ve ever made.

Bonus:

My favorite FMV clip from the game. It loses a little when watched out of context, but its combination of music and visuals are damn creepy (and sad), regardless: