On January 31, 1999 - twenty-two years ago- Konami gave the world the first episode of Silent Hill, one of the most interesting horror series in the history of the video game, as iconic as it is unfortunate: over the course of twenty years, the creature of Team Silent was able to donate to the world of gaming a horrifying universe made of sick and extreme aesthetics, introspection and skilful reworking of some topoi of gothic and horror literature of all times, starting from a central element such as that of small American city crossed by unspeakable secrets.
A figure of speech of the kind that Silent Hill has revived so strongly that it has been taken as a model by at least two other historical videogame sagas.
To celebrate the anniversary, here is a long narratological speculation / analysis of the series and its central element. Are you ready? Let's go!
Silent Hill, a merry provincial town (cursed)
The story of the Silent Hill saga is that of a cursed city, a lost place in the fog and out of this world in which since its foundation (and even earlier, if we look at the history of the native tribes of the place), in which horrible things have happened due to the action of the god Samael and his merciless followers.
The writing work in the construction of this world still appears truly remarkable today: the Silent Team not only conceived an excellent gameplay formula, made of an explosive mixture of survival horror, detection and introspective story, but above all a layered and complex backstory, made up of cosmic and terrible gods, secret sects with aberrant rites, evil forces that manage to feed on the nightmares of those who visit the city.
A colossal horror scenario, made of terrifying places and memorable and, above all, credible characters.
Like many other great stories, however, Silent Hill was above all a series with strong and powerful thematic ingredients, rooted in American literature and cinemai.
If Resident Evil, at the time a competitor to Silent Hill, characterized itself as a sci-fi horror, Silent Hill clung to a story of the supernatural much more rooted in foklore and legends, on the more "fantastic" and "metaphysical" side of the genre (a topic we talked about here).
And what's more "American" than the theme of cursed city?
City of darkness
Since its origins, American horror has always played with the fundamental element of the damned city, portrayed as a place apparently normal and indeed standard bearer of the "American way of life" but in reality home to unspeakable secrets.
Although when we visit Silent Hill it has already "fallen", the imaginary city of Konami has many of these characteristics: its structure is that of a classic provincial town, with a geography formed by an intertwining of streets that connect the fundamental places of the community (the sheriff's office, the schools, the diner ...), however, seen from a distorting and disturbing perspective, his past is shaken by extraordinary and terrifying events but, above all, his citizenship is a community corrupted by evil, home to secrets that led to death and despair (Samael's order).
All the evil encountered by Harry, James and the other protagonists of the series is none other than the reflection of the original sins of the community (at least in part), leading to a heavy burden on the shoulders of the offenders' descendants.
There are many examples of this type in literature, cinema and TV series: you go from Lovecraftian cities like Arkham and Innsmouth (prey to cosmic horrors and ancient secrets) to reach as far as marked inspirations of Silent Hill like Twin Peaks (in which the oddities of the city cross over into a frightening and fascinating dream dimension), passing through novels such as Stephen King's Salem Nights or movies like The Fog by John Carpenter.
In a different way and in different ways, all these works tell the same story, that of a "solar" place contaminated by something dark ending up in one way or another to be or abandoned or destroyed or cursed again.
A "poetic" that is also nourished by reality.
With their immense extent, the United States of America can boast a myriad of isolated territories and abandoned population centers for a long time for various reasons, from epidemics to natural disasters. It is not only the remains of the first settler cities, or those of the pioneers arriving in the west, but also very recently built cities such as Centralia (Pennsylvania), the city that inspired Silent Hill in its dignified film counterpart (2006).
Those who know the mythology of the Japanese saga may also be familiar with the history of this unfortunate city: founded in the eighteenth century and structured around the anthracite mining industry, Centralia was abandoned in 1962 due to a violent fire in the ancient mines below the city. Due to the climatic and environmental conditions, the fire has not yet died out, and has produced unsustainable conditions for the residents, who within a few years began to leave the area.
Since, Centralia has slowly taken on the spooky and scary aspect that we also find in Silent Hill (above all, we repeat, at the cinema). A sad fate that, not surprisingly, seems to derive from an unclear act of the city administration: the order to set fire to an old mine, an extremely dangerous (read “irresponsible”) act that has brought disgrace to an entire community.
It is appropriate to say that in some way "The circle closes".
An American topos
The question, at this point, is "why"?
Because a theme as dark and in a certain sense "uncomfortable" as that of the corrupt community has made its way into a country and a culture as conservative and traditionalist as the American one?
Probably, really in reaction to that culture. At least in part.
If it is true that the theme of the "city with a bad past behind it" is stuff that dates back to Lovecraft, who used the theme for pure entertainment purposes (the good HP was certainly not a progressive), starting from the 60s to speak of communities corrupted by an ancient evil as done by King or Carpenter has become a way to talk about politics.
Politics, yes.
The small community threatened by unmentionable cults (Silent Hill), mass hysteria that become fundamentalism (The Mist) or ghosts of the past (The Fog) is none other than the metaphor of modern America, born of hatred and violence (the witch hunt, the genocide of American Indians, the widespread use of brute force and for this led to be crushed under the weight of those sins.
The ghost and cursed city is therefore a deformed mirror of normality, which highlights the hypocrisies, the unspoken horrors, the ambiguities and the false myths of a nation that has built itself on them.
Of course, Silent Hill does not do "politics", at most it reworks (unconsciously?) The theme to make it a springboard for a good work of entertainment but, perhaps unwittingly, gave the topos new strength, spreading it among the younger generations.
Non solo Silent Hill
To underline the power of the rhetorical figure of the cursed city, we also think about the fact that Silent Hill was not the only videogame work to have led players to investigate supernatural or dreamlike mysteries in remote towns of the American province.
Deadly Premonition, Access Game open-world investigative for PS3, Nintendo Switch, PC and Xbox 360 released in 2010, he ventured to pay homage to the Twin Peaks plot to the extreme, putting us in the shoes of a federal investigator who has arrived in a quiet provincial town to investigate the crude murder of a girl.
A choice disputed by many, who saw in the attempt to pay tribute also a disconcerting absence of original ideas, but he undoubtedly had the ability to immerse us in a captivating setting consisting of the classic stars-and-stripes mountain village, with its fundamental places (the police district, the hotel, the school…).
Also 2010 is then the turn of what is considered one of the best adventure games ever to appear on Xbox, that is Alan Wake. Built on the typical plot of the horror novel writer who was somehow trapped in his nightmares (a tribute to Stephen King's literature), Alan Wake brought the topos of the "cursed city" to an extraordinary maturity, allowing us to explore a lively setting, full of secrets and able to restore the whole atmosphere of the classics of the genre, also thanks to the cinephile soul of Remedy Studio.
Finally, it is from the end of 2020 Little hope, second episode of the series The Dark Pictures di Supermassive Games. Set in a town lost in the woods, with a group of unfortunates blocked by a thick fog and a supernatural force (does it remind you of anything?), Little Hope is a sort of little dream for lovers of American gothic: between dilapidated houses, Georgian-style churches and signs of witch hunt, players must fight their way through a creepy scenario that, despite various stumbles and a very short duration, manages to marvelously pay homage to both Silent Hill and Alan Wake, as if it were a splendid tribute to two more illustrious colleagues.
If it is true every good horror story is also the story of a haunted place, capable of giving the reader, spectator or player a thrill behind the back thanks to its story or its appearance, then Silent Hill had the great merit of giving the world of video games one of the haunted places par excellence, as frightening as it is capable of embodying profound meanings - even “social” - of the genre.
To prove it is not only the long following of the brand (a continuation that however did not prevent Konami from dramatically stopping the making of other episodes of the series), how much the fact that it has been honored by other video games more or less indirectly.
Even more, Silent Hill and its digital followers are proof of how much the video game can successfully inherit, empower and pass on pop culture fundamentals carried forward over the centuries by literature first and then by cinema, proposing them in another dimension, deeper and more interactive.
And so, Silent Hill, thank you so much.
Really.
