Silent Hill: Casting and Characters

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 25, 2006

Filed under: Nerd Culture 5 comments

Check out the IMDB listing for Silent Hill. There is a lot of strange stuff going on here.

Kim Coates, who played the officer with the burned hands, apparently ALSO played Henry Townshend in the same movie? I don’t remember any character going by that name. Furthermore, that’s the name of the main character from Silent Hill 4: The Room.

Tanya Allen played someone named “Anna”, which is fine, but she’s also credited with playing Pyramid Head?!? We get a good look at ‘ol Pyramid Head in the movie, and he’s obviously a beefy, bare-chested grim reaper. He never, ever speaks, so she’s not the voice actor behind him. So what’s the deal here? Did she perform the motion-capture for the CGI? I can’t imagine any other explanation.

Roberto Campanella is credited as Red Pyramid/Janitor/Colin. Now, we know who the janitor was. He’s the guy who was the corpse which was bent backwards, bound in barbed wire, and hung over a toilet. But who is Red Pyramid? That would have to be the same thing as Pyramid Head. But he’s too tall and lanky to have played the part. So two people are both credited for playing a part that they couldn’t have played, and that same part went by two different names.

Christopher Britton played Eddie Dombrowski. I don’t remember seeing a character that looked like him in the film, unless he was one of the unnamed members of the cult. Eddie Dombrowski was also the name of one of the characters in Silent Hill 2, but that Eddie was quite fat and looked nothing like Britton.

The memorable quotes page lists dialog for Pyramid Head?!? Apparently at some point he says, “Filth and lies!” Hmmmm. I wonder who the movie is calling Pyramid Head?

Alice Krige played Christabella, the cult leader. (Note that she also played the Borg Queen in one of the Trek movies). They also credit her as playing Valtiel The Yellow God. What? I’m pretty sure that if anyone like that showed up I’d remember them.

UPDATE: I think it’s plain that Eddie and Henry are just homage to the games, similar to the way they had “Dr. Carmack” in the Doom movie. This still doesn’t sort out the Red Pyramid / Pyramid Head confusion. The official site lists Pyramid Head as Red Pyramid. If you go to the wallpapers section you’ll see a desktop wallpaper with Pyramid Head under the heading “Red Pyramid”.

So who the heck is “Pyramid Head” in the movie, and how was he / she / it played by a woman, and why did it have speaking lines?

 


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5 thoughts on “Silent Hill: Casting and Characters

  1. retinaburn says:

    It could be that the missing characters had been removed from the final cut. Just a theory.

  2. Ashley says:

    IMDB probably just completely screwed up with the listing. I know that there are going to be a lot of special features/deleted scenes on the DVD, but I severely doubt that Eddie, Henry and the Yellow God were intended to be in the film. On that final note, Valtiel is not confirmed as being the Yellow God, anyway. Valtiel’s name actually signifies it as being just one of God’s angels — an important one at that; silenthillforum.com elites would surely put that site in it’s place on that.

  3. Shamus says:

    My knowledge of Silent Hill’s mythology is limited and I couldn’t tell if this was a mistake or a misunderstanding.

    Thanks for the info.

  4. Kristin says:

    If you purchase the movie and watch the special features it clears the questions up a bit. IMDB has alot of incorrect info. Anna said “filth and lies”, she was speaking to Dahlia. And the man who played Colin(janitor) was the one who also played Pyramid Head. The muscley body is actually costume.

  5. Hi everybody!

    Silent Hill has never been about action or running around shooting things; doing that would effectively destroy what made Silent Hill so darn creepy and great. In many ways, RE4 proved that you can’t have it both ways; the game simply didn’t have the atmosphere of the previous games and the gameplay got incredibly repetitive. In my humble opinion, I think the major reason for RE4’s drastic changes was because Capcom was in a financial slump at the time due to a string of high-profile flops and needed something that would appeal to Joe Average more than their fanbase. Not to mention Mikami’s less-than-intelligent prospect of releasing the remake of Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero only on the GameCube also contributed to the misguided notion that people were getting tired of the series when, the low sales of those two games can be attributed to being on a third-place machine.

    I know that Silent Hill 0rigins is using an over-the-shoulder perspective, but I’m banking on it purely as a design choice considering the game is being released on a handheld. I still doubt that Konami would be silly enough to blantantly rip-off RE4 when each and every Silent Hill game has sold quite well on its own. I doubt money would be an issue since they also create the Metal Gear games, which is practically a liscense to print money.

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