A GAME I LIKE: SILENT HILL 2
(Warning: This article may contain spoilers)
BOO!
Did that frighten you? Probably not. After all, jump scares do not really work in literature. I would even argue that they are not really effective in other media either, at least not if the intent is to create a sense of fear. The body reacting to a surprise and creating a frightening atmosphere are two different things.
I began this article talking about the difference between jump scares and a scary atmosphere because I believe Silent Hill 2 to be one of the most effective games when it comes to achieving the latter.
Contrast its opening with that of another gaming sequel, Resident Evil 2. That game’s opening is pretty typical in that it apes the Hollywood blockbuster. It’s all high-speed vehicular chases and explosions, and literally the first action undertaken by the player is to run through the ruins of a destroyed town evading zombies.
That’s not how Silent Hill 2 begins. This game starts with the protagonist, James Sunderland, peering at himself in a dirty mirror in a rundown public toilet. The camera then cuts to a far off shot showing his lonely figure as he walks out and turns to look out across a picturesque landscape. “Mary”, he says to himself, “could you really be in this town”?
With these words Konami sets up one of the most intriguing plots of any videogame. Sunderland has come to Silent Hill because he has received a letter from his wife, explaining how she is waiting for him in their ‘special place’. Nothing too unusual in that you might think, only Mary died three years ago. Already then, the game is exploring frightening themes that go beyond boo! tactics. Isn’t clinging to hope in spite of all evidence to the contrary, not letting go and finding closure a frightening thing?
After this brief cutscene the player begins the journey into town. Whereas Resident Evil 2 opened in the middle of Racoon City, Silent Hill 2 took the rather bold step of having the player take a long, long walk with nothing but themselves (and...is that footsteps following us through the woods?) and then, when they do arrive in the town itself, to wander through mostly deserted streets until they finally figure out exactly where they are supposed to be going. Whereas everything happens almost immediately in Resident Evil 2, in Silent Hill 2 not much happens for quite some time.
I see this as another bold step. What the game is trying to do here is emphasise James’s isolation and loneliness. One can imagine him clinging onto this infinitesimal shred of hope that somehow, contrary to all facts, his wife may actually be alive but unable to talk to anyone about it. He kept it all to himself and now he is in Silent Hill, and the town has become a projection of his innermost thoughts. James is psychologically lost and the player literally so, wandering around with only a vague sense of where they should be going.
At this point it might be worth saying something about the speculations fans of the series have regarding this game’s more surreal aspects. Although Silent Hill does not throw monsters at you right from the get-go, they do exist. And what twisted creations they are. Curiously, not all the characters you meet along the way seem bothered by these aberrations. For example, there is a little girl called Laura, who claims to have known Mary, who can be found skipping through various locations without a care in the world. Fans speculate that Silent hill draws in people who have psychological issues and confronts them with their mental traumas. Laura, who as a young innocent has no dark secret to confront, sees no monsters. But, for James, a visit to Silent Hill’s hospital is a nightmare of blood and rust and demented nurses shuffling out of the darkness to stab with knives. Mary died of a terminal illness and maybe the horror of that gave Sunderland a fear of hospitals?
And then there is one of my favourite, and possibly the most tragic, character in this or any videogame, Angelica Orusco. She is actually the first character James meets, as he passes through a lonely graveyard on the way to the town. Angelica seems very jumpy around James, and as the player progresses they learn why: She had been abused by her father and has been left psychologically damaged and terrified of men. Remember how I said Silent Hill adapts itself to a person’s innermost fears? Well, Angelica is pursued by a grotesque monster that kind of looks like two figures writhing around on a filthy bed, which is probably a projection of her memories of being sexually abused by her father. The player also meets Angelica toward the end, and again we get a glimpse of how Silent Hill appears to her. For James, the town is always shrouded in fog and interiors are always dimly lit and shadowy. For Angelica, everywhere is on fire. “For me, it’s always like this”, she says sadly as she walks slowly up a burning flight of stairs, apparently into the roaring flames.
Although there are monsters in this game, I don’t think they are what make the game frightening. They look kind of grotesque and there is a mild sense of anxiety when you can hear something shuffling toward you but can’t see where it is coming from. But they move slowly and are no problem to deal with. The locations are actually more frightening than the monsters themselves. A common theme in the Silent Hill series is to have the player walk through locations that are usually bustling with activity, such as a shopping mall, a fairground or a hospital, only here they are deserted and come across as places of almost intolerable solitude as all you can hear are your own lonely footsteps.
For the, the scariest location is this underground prison. It looks so forbidding and awful, and you only have to imagine being locked up in such a place to feel a sense of dread. To me, this location would be scary enough if you did not have the monsters and relied only on the awful location itself, and the clues you pick up that piece together the terrible fate of the unfortunates locked up here.
Getting back to the monsters, undoubtedly the most famous of them all is one known as ‘Pyramid Head’. This creature wears a filthy doctor’s robe and surgical gloves, has a head that is a rusty metal pyramid and always carries a huge sword that scrapes along the ground with a teeth-jarring noise. This demon stalks James throughout the game, forcing him to relive his nightmare of losing his wife over and over as it repeatedly kills Maria.
Maria? Wasn’t his wife called Mary? Yes she was, but while in Silent Hill, James comes across somebody called Maria who looks just like his wife, only a little bit sexier. Sometimes this Maria claims to be Mary herself and knows things that could only have been known by her, such as very personal knowledge about holidays James had with his wife. Is this really Mary, or is this just another projection that Silent Hill has created to force James to confront the truth?
So, what is the truth? It turns out that James is not such a good guy after all. Mary did not die of a terminal illness. James murdered her because he could not cope with caring for a disabled wife and ‘wanted his life back’. His lonely journey through Silent Hill was not really a survival horror dash past groaning, shuffling zombies that must be despatched with a gun blast, but that of a man taking a very personal journey through his own guilt, forced to confront his psychological issues and mental traumas.
What a frightening thought.
Thanks to Konami for the images