T w e n t y S i d e d

Yesterday I talked about how useless the subplot was in the Silent Hill movie. Actually, even though the scenes that take place in the “real world” have little value for the purposes of the plot, those scenes had a great deal of cinematic value.

The trick with the town of Silent Hill is how it shifts or changes, sometimes becoming spooky, sometimes becoming hellish. The main character is caught in “spooky” Silent Hill. It is decayed and foggy, and ash falls from the sky like snow. This is really unnerving at first, but eventually we get used to it. Then the view switches back to the real world and suddenly we can see sunlight and color again. A weight lifts and you can almost taste the fresh air. These cuts back to the real world help the spooky Silent Hill to hold its potency.

Having said that, it’s obviously decadent to burn up 40 minutes of screen time in order to provide a nice visual contrast. If it were up to me, I would keep the footage from where Christopher is exploring the town, and toss the rest of that story from the point where he leaves Silent Hill and goes digging for clues elsewhere. Having watched this movie a couple of times at home, this is what I ended up doing. It was very nice of them to set up the chapter break on the DVD to make it easy to jump to the Silent Hill stuff without needing to search.

At one point the nature of the town is clearly shown to the viewer. (Much more clearly than was ever possible in the game, I might add.) Rose is running around in the school, which is now a hellish nightmare of caged horrors. Despite this, the place retains the layout of the normal school. There are still rooms and hallways and lockers. At the same moment, her husband Christopher is in the real world, in the same school, standing in the same hallway. The movie does a cut from one to the other without moving. It just shifts from one version of the scene to the other, which lets the audience (particularly people who never played the game) understand what is going on.

I find this fascinating. This isn’t the same room with a new paint job. This looks like the same place, only constructed out of different materials. The check out the metal plate floor.

Just for fun, I made a composite image of the two:

The contrast does make the evil Silent Hill more awful. It works really well, it it’s something that isn’t possible in a single-viewpoint game.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.