And then the controller was thrown and the console forcibly shut off... Sleep well, people!
In my restless dreams, I see that town... Silent Hill. So do we.
- Silent Hill
- Silent Hill 2
- Silent Hill 3
- Silent Hill 4
- Silent Hill: Origins
- Silent Hill: Homecoming
- Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
- Silent Hill: Downpour
- Silent Hills
- Silent Hill: The Short Message
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Game Series
- The entire relative linearity of Silent Hill is very subtly terrifying if you think about it. The games are well-known for their locked/jammed doors, but whereas in other games these would just be an annoying and illogical inconvenience, in Silent Hill, it gives very much the feeling that the town is leading you, pulling you about on a string, making sure you go where it wants you to go. For example: There are occasions in all games where something happens and the text that comes up as you leave is not "You unlocked the door.", it's "The door is unlocked now.", implying that whatever was keeping you there is letting you go. Think about this on a much grander scale. Everything you do, is it not in the town's plan? The monsters, the puzzles, the obstacles both physical and psychological that you must overcome — are they a test? Are they some rite of passage? Or are you the town's plaything to throw around until you finally give in and succumb or die? Or all three? ...Sleep well.
- The hospitals are bad enough, but the notes lying around suggest that they're staffed entirely by sociopaths. Take the budget note from Origins, where it states that Alchemilla's cutting "spending on inpatient care and consultancy fees", directly above a note mentioning how they're not cutting any funding for the staff party ("our recreation budget is locked away where no one can tamper"). Or the iron lung warning from the same game ("Patient deaths during therapy are not to be treated lightly. I find it hard to believe that someone could 'accidentally' overload every valve on the equipment..."), made worse by the fact that someone's scribbled "Have fun!" on the instructions for the iron lung. Or the notice from 3 stating how nurses that abuse the patients get locked in solitary confinement instead of being fired. Or the electroshock note from Homecoming:"...setting the electroshock machine beyond the seizure threshold has yielded impressive results in the patients. The most violent and depressed patients are rendered completely docile... The only side effects have been minor: memory loss, some dislocated bones, one fractured leg, and a patient bit off his tongue. This accident was quite a nice side effect as this particular patient was also one of our noisiest. I've instructed the doctors to continue with this intensity level for all treatments."
- The enemies. First it was simply an Eldritch Location. Then the residents come out to greet you.
- The very creepy part is that Silent Hill... is a normal town. It's described throughout the games as a relaxing, tourist like town with a very checkered past, with actual people living there. We repeat: People live in Silent Hill. Which makes the supernatural atmosphere that lingers under it chilling to say the least.
2006 Movie
- Rose's first experience with the otherworld; she's wandering around, trying to find Sharon, and then she finds a crucified, disemboweled body... that's still alive. Immediately after, a Grey Child comes out of the shadows behind her, before she even knows what's happening, it starts wailing, stretching and contorting as more of them surround her.
- Pyramid Head is the epitome of nightmare fuel. He first shows up at Midwich Elementary School, with a mound of bugs (mentioned below) following him, and holding a skinless corpse, towering over Rose. Later on, he corners Rose and Cybil in the boiler room and stabs at them through the door, eventually making a hole big enough to try and grab them. His second appearance is even worse; he manifests right behind Anna on the steps of the church. He carries her up to the door, rips off Anna's dress, rips off her skin, then throws it towards the horrified Rose and Cybil as they retreat indoors. He only has two scenes, but he makes one hell of an impression.
- Anna's predicament is also terrifying, considering how she was born in Silent Hill after it was cursed by Alessa. All of her life she was indoctrinated by Christabella and her cult in believing that Dahlia had birthed a demon, who trapped all of the inhabitants inside Silent Hill, and forced everyone to scavenge for food and supplies daily while retreating into the Church before the Otherworld arrives. She would then be horribly killed by Pyramid Head, never knowing that her entire life was a lie and that the faith she had desperately clinged onto for survival was responsible for her fate all along.
- Dark Alessa, all the way. Special moments when Rose encounters her and...dear god."Look at me, I'm burning."
- Colin the janitor, brutally reverse hog-tied with barbed wire in the school bathroom, if Rose having to take a key out of his mouth isn't creepy enough, then him crawling and groaning out of the stall soon after is. He has the ability to create the bugs, the last we see of him, the bathroom is covered in eggs and fleshy growths, and all he can do is scream.
- Alessa appearing in the church... no, not Dark Alessa, the real Alessa. With barbed wire. The music really doesn't help. All while the lead up to Alessa's Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Even her mother is horrified.Dahlia: Alessa...what have you become..?
- The ending is just haunting... being trapped in the fog world forever? Turns out, according to the sequel, there IS a way to get out using a particular talisman. Don't have it? Oh just go ahead and cut and/or burn a copy of the runic circle into your flesh. The person who goes through this is Vincent, who because of his age was either taken when he was a baby, or actually born in the nightmarish Otherworld.
- The opening scene. Rose and Chris are looking for a sleepwalking Sharon, we then see her at the edge of a cliff, the lake below shifts into the otherworld, and the camera pans down to Dark Alessa, staring back up at her, with a horrible Slasher Smile.
- And the icing on the cake? They only find her just as she's about to jump.
- The Dark Nurses and their awkward, jerky movements. It was very, deliberately unnatural.
- Hell, just the sounds they make, it's like every one of their bones is breaking as they move.
- They also provide one of the best jump scares in the movie; Rose is halfway through a crowd of them, trying to get through quietly, she glances over her shoulder... and one of the Nurses wakes up and slashes at her.
- The movements of the Nurses seems so unnatural, because it is! The effect was achieved by the nurses being filmed moving backwards then the recording was reversed, a really disturbing effect achieved by one of the most simple tricks ever.
- There is something subtly horrifying about the hopscotch game that you see at the school in the courtyard. The beginning is labeled 'Hell' and the end of it 'Heaven'. Many people have only ever seen it with just the numbers, so a heaven-and-hell drawn in would be pretty creepy if you'd never seen it before.
- Those bugs with the human-esque faces that hung out with Pyramid Head.
- Speaking of those bugs, Rose gets to see them swarming a hallway beforehand, granted, the hallway was full of cultists, but still.
- Just the way they swarm into the room Rose and Cybil are hiding in, inching closer... and closer...
- When Cybil is burned alive, you see her epidermal layer of skin blacken and flake off, and the layer below that bubbling. And this all happened in front of Sharon... she got to see what they were going to do to her.
- Another type of Nightmare Fuel, but the fact that someone (i.e. Christabella) was actually able to brainwash a whole town (or at least part of it) into genuinely believing that roasting an innocent little girl alive over hot coals was a good thing. None of the onlookers seem even remotely troubled by Alessa's screaming.
- The way the scene is set up makes it even worse, all we see at first are the cultists, with smoke rising up in the foreground, and all you can hear is Alessa screaming in agony. If you don't know much about the game, you probably won't even know what's happening at first.
- Say what you will about Jodelle Ferland's acting, but what takes the cake in her performance are her shockingly real screams of pain while being burned alive and even afterward in the hospital. Just hearing her scream is horrible enough, since it sounds so real, but the film had to show the audience Alessa's burned body afterward.
- The worst part is Alessa's subsequent Deal with the Devil; Dark Alessa appears outside her isolation chamber, staring at her, Alessa wordlessly reaches out and touches the side of the chamber, it begins to decay... and Silent Hill transforms for the first time.
- There's also the fact that Lisa has her cameo appearance there too, caring for Alessa in the past. She's seen when Rose comes into the Otherworld hospital room and confronts Dark Alessa...but Lisa always keeps her face away from her, but is heard crying. When Rose lets Dark Alessa in her, the camera shows why: Lisa's eyes were burned away by Alessa and has been crying blood from her injuries.
- Alessa's life at school was horrible. She was constantly tormented by her classmates and it seems the teachers did absolutely nothing to stop this. One scene shows Alessa running away from a crowd of children yelling insults at her and hiding in the bathroom, where Colin, the school janitor, was cleaning the floors. The most chilling part about this scene is that Colin doesn't say anything to Alessa, he just gives her a look that can only be described as "predatory" and we then see a close up of his nametag and hear Alessa screaming. Though it's never stated outright, it's obvious that Colin raped Alessa in this scene.Alessa: You know what can happen to little girls when they're left alone.
Comic Books
- The comic books flat-out state the entire city feeds on guilt and fear and can lure anyone it desires to the town. Seriously, read them and look at the artwork... as if the games weren't bad enough on their own.
- Past Life has more than its fair share of disturbing moments. Pretty much every appearance of the skull-faced creature (including the revelation of its true identity) counts, as well as the backstories revealed in issue three and the entire fourth issue.
Other
- The three videos from the Art of Silent Hill DVD (and later, The Silent Hill Experience PlayStation Portable UMD): "Fukuro"
(NSFW), "Kinoko", and "Usagi". Hoo boy.- Kinoko (meaning "mushroom" in Japanese) is a blurry, monochrome tour through several bizarre scenes, including a patch of ground with some strange twitching fungus and a corpse whose legs slowly stretch across the floor and up the wall. All set to a dark, triphop music track.
- "Fukuro" (meaning "bag" or "sack" in Japanese), starring Pyramid Head and the Lying Figures from Silent Hill 2, and the "Fukuro Lady" (actually Lisa Garland), is not only the most disturbing short of them all, but quite possibly the most disturbing thing in the entire franchise. Horrifying sounds, pulsing noise music and grotesque, sexually charged surrealist imagery makes this an absolutely traumatizing piece of media. It's as if Francis Bacon made a porno film.
- "Usagi" (meaning "rabbit" in Japanese) is a grotesque music video of Robbie the Rabbit pushing a dead Robbie the Rabbit through Silent Hill's Otherworld. Which is inhabited by other Robbie the Rabbits. All of whom have rapidly twitching heads. Another piece of Silent Hill media that makes you concerned for the mental health of the developers.
- Word of God indicates that the creature named "Fukuro Lady" from the video is neither Lisa Garland or the Brookhaven nurse. This misconception may be attributed to an entry◊ in the Book of Lost Memories that mentions Lisa's afterimage in an area of the hospital in Silent Hill 3. This afterimage is not Fukuro but bears an extremely similar appearance to her.
- The mentioned Creator Backlash in the trivia page, regarding the infamous "circumcision" incident on the Silent Hill Wiki. Whatever happened to the perpetrator is as weird as it is creepy. As if to say that the craziness of Silent Hill itself has gotten into him.
