*Spoiler warning for Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill: Origins, Silent Hill: Homecoming, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Silent Hill: Downpour*
White noise from a dusty television pelts James Sunderland with echoes of a horrific act. Amidst the hissing cacophony of static are muffled screams, formerly tucked away deep in his subconscious. James came to Silent Hill searching for Mary, his late wife. But instead of an ethereal reunion between ill-fated lovers, a dark secret rears its ugly head: James is secretly Mary’s murderer.
Silent Hill 2′s big revelation hits like a baseball bat to the skull on an initial playthrough. It’s a moment that subsequent entries spent years chasing the coattail of, much to their chagrin. Too often, there’s this predisposition with being the next Silent Hill 2, and that ambition manifests in the most superficial ways possible. Despite noble intentions.
Silent Hill: Homecoming wasn’t the first in this long-line of imitators, but it’s the most egregious. Alex Shepard, a military veteran, comes home after fighting overseas to aid in a search for his missing brother Josh. Eventually, the trail leads straight to Silent Hill. While “war is hell” might be overplayed in horror, fans salivated over the idea of a soldier’s nightmarish delusions manifesting in the titular ghost town. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, when the story stumbles towards its climax, Alex learns he wasn’t in the army, but rather a mental hospital after an unfortunate boating accident took Josh’s life. What’s supposed to be a gut-punch instead yields belly laughs. Nevermind how goofy it is that Alex can blitz monsters with spinning back-fists despite never being trained by the army–this cheap twist highlights a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Silent Hill 2’s revelation so potent.
When you learn that James killed Mary, it recontextualizes the entire game. From sexually-charged bubblehead nurses tormenting James to numerous doppelgangers reenacting Mary’s death–the town projects their abusive relationship in terrifying metaphor. These are nightmares born of James’ unconscious mind, with propose weaved into their existence. Punishment not just for what he did to Mary, but for his desperate attempt to blot out the truth. Meanwhile, the twist involving Alex is just a massive unearned gotcha. Somehow, he’s completely forgotten that he was in a hospital, with an elaborate fantasy to boot. Unlike James, who’s denial comes from a selfish state of mind, Alex doesn’t have a real excuse to forget what happened. Josh’s death was an accident, and regardless, there’s no strong through-line as to why that event would push Alex to take on a soldier’s persona. The shaky reasoning is that Adam Shepard, their father, was a soldier, so Alex took after him, but that’s it. Worse yet, this twist is forgotten about almost immediately after it’s brought up, with barely a whisper of it before the credits roll.
It’s a crying shame. Homecoming ditched exploring wartime trauma through Silent Hill’s foggy lenses because of a half-assed twist. For years, the series indulged in this what-if-the-protagonist-just-forgot nonsense. In Silent Hill: Origins, Travis Grady forgets that his father hung himself until the town reminded him. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories took it one step further, with Harry Mason discovering he lived inside his daughter’s dreams during therapy. None of it was real. No matter how different the answers might have seemed, they were still copying Silent Hill 2’s homework.
Silent Hill: Downpour tried to side-step this criticism by tweaking the formula a bit. Murphy Pendleton is a convict, and he can recount every single solitary detail of his crime. During a routine transfer to another prison, though, his bus takes a tumble into Silent Hill, where he braves the fog without delusion as a crutch. Murphy was locked up because he shanked a fellow inmate in the shower. Revenge for his son’s murder. Naturally, that backstory comes to a head while he’s in Silent Hill. In a scene devoid of subtlety, Murphy confesses to a nun that what he did was wrong. Immediately after, the town decides he’s reformed and free to leave.
Downpour might have bucked the trend in some regard, but only slightly. Unlike Alex, Murphy is aware of his baggage from the get-go, but the confessional undermines Silent Hill 2 in a catastrophically different way. At the curtain call, there are several possible outcomes for James. In one ending, he crashes into Toluca lake after realizing Mary is gone forever, while in another, he attempts her resurrection through evil magics. Every finale is just as “canon” as the other. Silent Hill isn’t passing judgment, no matter how reprehensible its occupants are. So when Murphy gets the okay to leave, this implies that Silent Hill wants every bad person to fess up, and that’s it, rather than being an ambivalent force that projects people’s nightmares. Which is fucked up when you consider Silent Hill 2’s “Leave” ending. James skips town; weird how the guy who murdered his wife in cold blood can walk free. Without really even admitting murder is bad!
Ironically, all these imitators failed to take one of Silent Hill 2’s most poignant lessons into consideration: the importance of standing on your own. It didn’t try to be Silent Hill: Part 2, despite how beloved the first entry was. Where Silent Hill conjures up images of fire, occult magics, and how familial bonds are thicker than blood, Silent Hill 2 evokes melancholy, broken promises, and how powerful emotions will always bubble to the surface. No matter how ugly the outcome. That’s why 18 years on, Silent Hill 2 is so revered, and not solely because of the damn good twist.
With whispers of a new Silent Hill taking shape, my only hope is that whoever is behind it forgets about Silent Hill 2. We’ve been there, done that, with several mediocre wannabes copying its notes already. Now is the time for new characters, stories, and horrors to emerge from the fog, without two-decade-old shackles weighing them down.
If we want more Silent Hill 2, it’ll always be there, waiting for us.