A fear of blood creates fear for the flesh.

A disturbing amount of time ago (2021), I undertook a project I dubbed Silent Hill: The Long Analysis, wherein I played through the original 1999 survival horror classic, developed by a division of Konami known as Team Silent. While I played through it, I took notes and tried to come up with ways to analyze the game with a really underbaked, rudimentary tool kit, and a lack of experience analyzing video games. I’ve played the game more since then, and also grown as a scholar and as a person. So I figured I might as well return to this set of blog posts and examine the end of Silent Hill. I’ve been meaning to finish it for far too long now. Let it never be said I don’t return to finish what I start.

When I last left off, I was complaining about sewer levels. I still believe sewers are the weakest part of Silent Hill, despite enjoying the enemies within, and some of the ideas present. The radio, a core part of your defenses as a player, ceases to work below ground. This means you don’t get the warning static as enemies approach, meaning that the enemies within the sewers – known as Hanged Scratchers – are able to creep up on you in ways that no other enemy in the game is. I used the Hanged Scratchers in a tabletop campaign I ran in 2020 I believe, wherein just one Hanged Scratcher was an enemy through an entire catacomb system, dynamically stalking the players and picking off NPCs left and right. They’re great, humanoid-insectoid abominations that never really seem to quit, and they seem to come from anywhere and everywhere.

In regards to Silent Hill, though, there’s still no helping a sewer level’s relative linearity and mundane appearance. It’s a set of beige or grey concrete tunnels, with a healthy helping of monsters. With no puzzles to speak off, the sewers aren’t particularly cerebral. They can be scary, but they aren’t as interesting as other areas in the game. Unlike the streets of Silent Hill, which is the other connective tissue the game gives us between places, there’s nothing particularly interesting to see.

But, we get through the sewers and head to the lighthouse. It is on the way to the lighthouse that Harry Mason (our protagonist, for those who have forgotten) meets up with not just Cybil, our police officer friend, but also Dahlia Gillespie, the increasingly suspicious and weird religious woman. Dahlia purported to help us with the Flauros, and conspires to split Cybil and Harry up. Harry goes to the lighthouse, while Cybil heads to the amusement park.

Silent Hill’s occult storyline takes a lot of flak from a certain subsection of the fanbase – as far as I can tell, this is a section of the fanbase that believes Silent Hill 2’s (2001) path of stories about personal sin was the correct one forward. But as much as I love Silent Hill 2, removing the occult from the series would have been a mistake. Silent Hill 2’s story is nigh-on perfect, but believing that a story with explicit occult references in it makes it bad or not psychological… well, that ignores the excellent plots of 1, 3, and 4. The original Silent Hill’s plot doesn’t just use demonic terms from historical texts (the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and the Lesser Key of Solomon both mention Flauros, the Duke of Hell, for instance), but it portrays the impact of a cult on small town Americana. It shows the rot that eats away at the people there as they abuse a child in the hope they will get what they desire. Dahlia Gillespie is a thoroughly rotten character, a woman who would sacrifice everything special about her tormented daughter Alessa just to raise a demon that would merge worlds together.

Silent Hill is about cults, but it’s also about trauma. It’s trauma, as the maligned Silent Hill: Ascension gestured at. But far from being a point of humour, or something that’s laboured on time and again, the first Silent Hill games use the structure of the cult to critique cycles of trauma. To dredge them up, again and again. We restage them, time and again, fascinated by the presence of violence in our games, in our stories. We gun down monsters, sure, but we are also confronted with the failure of people. People are the ones who let Silent Hill the town go to hell. And while the game is not always particularly refined (this is a 1999 game after all), the points it raises are pertinent. It always draws me close to tears when I see the suffering of Alessa. Dahlia realizing what she can do to her daughter is made more effective by a simple, childlike plea for togetherness. For life to be “normal”.  Alessa sighs in a flashback sequence: “Oh, but mommy. I just want to be with you. Just two of us. Please understand.” This sequence is playable, but it’s also one defined by the technology it is built on. The hitches between each line – as the lines are grabbed from the disc drive in the PS1 – add to the feeling of weight, giving each line an importance it wouldn’t otherwise have. The voice acting is clunky and odd, but it’s charming. It’s an inexorable part of the game – and it’s not the bad kind of voice acting that we see in the original Resident Evil (1997). You were almost a Jill Sandwich! Instead, you get voice acting that feels raw and imperfect, human.

Have you seen a little girl?

Just turned seven last month… Short, black hair…

My daughter.

People remember these words, and how often Harry repeats them. People make fun of them – and, admittedly, it can get kind of funny. But the intent behind it, the repetition, gives us a window into the character. Harry Mason is a man who loves his daughter. On the other side, Dahlia Gillespie is a woman who hates her daughter. We understand them both – understand their human complexities. Harry is made even more human in 3, but I think we know enough about him in 1 to attach to him. He’s just a regular guy. That’s what differentiates Silent Hill from Resident Evil, of course. Instead of being a hardened badass, you’re just a guy. You’re frail. You get beaten up, you can get exhausted, you can’t aim your gun very well at any kind of range. Harry isn’t just human in the narrative – he’s human when you’re playing, too. Horror games have carried this forward time and again, and it’s not like Silent Hill was the first to invent the idea of a regular person in a horror game. But it remains one of the best, because Harry is forthright.

Those human qualities dredge the cult to the surface. The cult could very easily have been faceless nonsense – more enemies to gun down. But they’re not. Kaufmann, Dahlia, Lisa – the people who run the cult, or were affected by the cult, make the story what it is. And they help us to recognize the brokenness of the space that is Silent Hill. A town ruined by its own dark ambitions, or by simple economics. Both work, a dark religion driving away tourists, and tourists not going to a town that has a fading lustre. We can imagine the people who once worked and lived in Silent Hill. We gun down nurses and doctors in the hospital, infected with parasites. We see children’s drawings on the walls, walk between desks of the children – everything we see and do in the original Silent Hill is a result of the cult’s adverse, malevolent influence. The town has rotted away.

The story is reaching a fever pitch at this point as we wander from place to place, inadvertently enacting Dahlia’s ritual in order to allow her to get a hold of the situation again. We wander around a fractured, broken amusement park, seeing rides that could not, should not be functioning in the hellscape we can see. When we reach the right point in the Lakeside Amusement Park, the Flauros activates (in a still striking in-engine cutscene), raising out of Harry’s hands and emitting beams of light.

The humanness of the game comes through when we have to face off against the first other human being we meet as a player, Cybil. Cybil’s words to us at the start of the game seem to be a deliberate, ironic warning about what you no doubt have to do on your first playthrough. “Before you pull the trigger”, she says, “know who you’re shooting. And don’t do it unless you have to. And don’t go blasting me by mistake.” Unless you had the foresight to grab the “unknown liquid” (unless you’ve played the game through once before, basically) facing off against Cybil can be an exercise in frustration. She’s been possessed by one of the parasites, and killing her is your only option to progress the game. It’s a tragic fight, one that’s underscored by how difficult it can be on the Hard difficulty in particular. She is fairly accurate, and takes a while to kill. But when she goes down, there really is the sense that all this could have been avoided. Agency in video games often makes us wonder – how could things have been different? What tools did the developer give me to change the outcome? Finding the unknown liquid leads on to the next game (aglaophotis is an essential part of Heather’s storyline), but it also allows you to effect change in this one. Silent Hill rewards thorough exploration, rewards mastery, and does it through narrative changes and gameplay ones. You are rewarded for good play in the first four Silent Hill games with star rankings. This one has a particularly interesting ranking system which rewards accuracy from different ranges (and severely punishes missed shots). In short, though, this system encourages repeated playthroughs, makes you want to come back and try to do better. Try to master the system as the developers want you to. To kill all the monsters as fast as you can, as accurately as you can – it is shockingly effective.

Whether or not you are able to save Cybil (using the unknown liquid ends the fight immediately, and, even cooler, killing the parasite at the beginning of the Amusement Park skips the fight too), the game progresses on to Nowhere.

Nowhere is the game’s final level, and it is remarkably clever. It incorporates some of the flashback sequences with Alessa I talked about before, finally giving her some character, but also concretizing her suffering, embodying it within the disembodied town. And the town does become disembodied. Nowhere must surely have inspired the idea of the looping, changing hallway in P.T.. The Otherworld is feeding us a place without a map, a place that combines rooms from all the previous areas of the game. It recontextualizes them. Broken into different parts, Silent Hill the town becomes even more deranged, even more unknowable – even more beyond saving.

As we work through all these places we’ve seen before, the game indexes our memory of these places and works to subvert them, making some rooms redundant, or different, or even just keeping them mostly the same but playing different sound effects in them. Sometimes that’s all it takes to put you on edge.

Reutilizing space like this is both efficient from an asset / development perspective but is also clever from a spatial sense. Our memory becomes clouded, and we start to realize that we cannot expect anything to make any sense. Not that Silent Hill has abided by any particular set of rules up until this point, but Nowhere is where everything goes totally off the rails. Any new room could hold anything. Maps become something we have to manage ourselves.

The game’s most famous scene is in Nowhere, too. We meet up with the poor nurse, Lisa, for the final time. And we discover that she is dead, and, worse, she is a monster. Poor Lisa staggers towards us, just wanting help, but Harry, in a moment of understandable fear, staggers backwards and slams the door on her. The scene is heartwrenching because we understand it. I often wish developers would let you control cutscenes sometimes, or play out horrifying moments like this, because I think a lot of players probably would make the same decision.

When we go back into the room, Lisa is gone. All that’s left is a small bit of writing about drugs – the thing Lisa fell into, the reason she got into this mess. I don’t want to make this a long spiel about the oddity that was Silent Hill 0rigins (2007), but Lisa’s characterization was all off in that game. She’s flirty, in control, all over the place, in 0rigins. In the original, we get Lisa. We get her, and she’s only in a few scenes. She’s a woman blackmailed because of her addiction, in over her head, and crushed beneath the weight of all of her decisions, even the ones she didn’t really get to make. She is another tragic figure alongside Alessa, one we root for, and one we mourn all the same. Watching as the blood trickles down her face, we mourn alongside her as we understand that she cannot be saved. It is a moment that stays with us. It is a moment that has stayed with me for a long time indeed.

Eventually, we reach the final boss. Depending on whether we did the stuff with Kaufmann at the resort, we’ll either get the Good version of the ending, or the Bad version of the ending. The good version has you face off against the Incubus, a marvelously designed demon and final boss that is my second favourite final boss of the whole series. Silent Hill 3’s God beats out the Incubus by just a little. The Incubus though is supremely cool, as is the music that plays when fighting them (My Heaven). A winged, bare-breasted, goat-headed demon (inspired by the look of the demon Baphomet), the Incubus brings down lightning bolts onto the surreal arena, a metal platform suspended in a sea of infinite darkness. It is hard to think of a cooler ending to a survival horror title than that. It’s not a very hard battle on Easy or Normal, but the lightning bolts do fiendish amounts of damage on Hard.

Team Silent did a great job with the naming of the final two bosses – it is either Incubus or Incubator, linking the two together simply by the use of language. It is amazing how effective language is at tying things together, yet how severely underestimated it is (still) by many video game writers. The choice of individual word choices are not always appreciated until you find a game that uses its writing to the best possible effect. The Incubator is an eerily glowing-white version of Alessa, a strikingly “regular” boss, but also a very human one. Again, linking into the effect of the cults on people, we face off against a representation of Alessa herself. Human impact – survival horror comes down to this. What are the choices we make? How do they come back to disturb us?

Regardless of what boss you face, Dahlia finally gets her comeuppance, and Harry escapes the town (or realizes, in the worst ending, that he is dying in the car crash at the start of the game, and the whole game was just a hallucination).

Silent Hill is a game that stands the test of time, but one that has also been left to languish. I said this in my stream about it, but it is a game that I cannot imagine not looking like it does. It needs the slow dialogue just as much as it needs the odd animations. Harry looking like he is made from sand is essential. Without that, it would not be Silent Hill. It is hard for me to envision a remake because I have spent so much time in this version of the town. Running around streets choked by PS1-induced fog, clomping through cramped, abandoned houses. Wondering what the next line will be as the dialogue whirs through the optical laser of the PS1.

Silent Hill is a fabulous game, and one that does deserve to live on, or even to live again. I cannot quite fathom how it would look, how modern audiences would feel about it, or how it would need to be reinterpreted or expanded. To me, Silent Hill does not need to be changed. It is a work of art that demands your attention, just like the other games in the series. It is tense, taut, and well-told. It is horrifying and grotesque and chilling. It still makes me uneasy, sets me on edge, and delights me in how it can challenge me and push me to get better. It makes me want to make horror games. It demands I make horror games of my own.  So I will. I will shoot for the star that is Silent Hill, and pray I can reach even halfway as high as it still shines, distant and proud, in the night sky.

The fear of blood creates fear for the flesh. The fear of bodily harm is the opening that psychological horror needs. Once we’re afraid of our wellbeing, our body, our mind starts to panic. And our mind starts to panic about a lot of things. Silent Hill exploits that, time and time again.

Silent Hill always did understand humans very well indeed.