To hope undying

I have always been in Silent Hill. I feel as though I could spend a lifetime just mapping out the corners of places which melt away the barriers of the inner and the outer world. This town is an incarnation of the unbearable weight of the subconscious. It can’t be just a hallucination. Silent Hill both is and is not in being. It spreads across the uncertain space between reality and nightmare, the cityscape extended by the sheer, all-consuming horror of the mind. It is liminal in the fullest capacity of the word, a realm between consciousness, memory, and death.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill.” I really can’t think of any games with a sentence that has such gravity. It’s the very first fracture in the boundary between memory and reality, as Mary's words make it sound like it exists only in recollection, but it indeed is a place where both of them have been. So, the town is already something dreamlike before I even get to it, and maybe, but just maybe, the rest of the game can be understood as an attempt to walk into a dream.

As someone obsessed with the symbolism of the forest, James's passage through the forest in the beginning immediately reminded me of the opening of Dante's Inferno. Selva oscura, the dark woods, is the place in which the familiar world has become spiritual and internal. Both journeys begin with a man entering a forest, and in both, the forest makes a threshold between the world of ordinary life and an interior space governed by its own, unknowable laws. Dante emerges into the woods having lost the “straight path,” and James enters Silent Hill having lost his own moral and psychological orientation. Both walks are descents into hell.

I have always been fascinated by abandoned living spaces, and the poetic rot of the domestic. Atmospherically, the game has a peculiar melancholy that is bonded with the fear and the eerie allure of these places. Abandonment has to be a metaphor for memory itself, as decay is narrative. An abandoned room is never empty; it slowly transforms into a space in which absence has become tangible and possibly even metaphysical. The bed remains, the wallpaper remains, but the being for whom these things possessed meaning has vanished, leaving behind a beautiful and melancholy picture of intimacy.

There is an almost embarrassing amount of discourse surrounding P.T. whenever horror attempts to do something interesting with space, as though the looping hallway were the final revelation of what spatial horror could accomplish. Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that P.T. would have been a masterpiece, and I will forever mourn it. But Silent Hill 2 Remake actually has the true beauty of it. The remake is a masterclass in spatial horror. Horror of the environment is the greatest when it’s about becoming uncertain whether “somewhere,” or even anywhere at all, possesses any stable meaning.

A swimming pool ceases to possess a bottom, a wall gives way to an opening that could not have existed before, and so on… There is a long history of horror built upon this principle: the transformation of the familiar into the impossible, from ancient labyrinths that reorganize themselves to haunted houses whose interiors exceed their exteriors (yes, I’m referencing House of Leaves hihi). I love when space also becomes biologically diseased. The “descent” has the infamous bodily passages. It evokes Hell as imagined by Dante, and I am not talking merely about visuals, but about a metaphysical landscape whose form reflects the condition of the soul. Rust, rot, flesh, viscera, dampness, and organic growth diminish the distinction of architecture and organism, and Silent Hill keeps pushing it until the whole environment appears to be decomposing. James is moving through the diseased anatomy of a place. And a diseased anatomy of a person.

The Otherworld as a phenomenon is probably the most complete rejection of the boundary between psychological and physical horror. It looks like the world is undergoing a pathological conversion. The transition is frequently marked by the iconic eruption of red rust, corroded metal, industrial machinery, and sounds that seemingly originate from somewhere beneath the architecture. The mechanical and the organic are both in the same gutter; everything grinds together, suffers, and screeches in agony. The omnipresence of rot is Mary's rot. It is the horror of illness in the flesh, the psychological horror of witnessing someone you love become unrecognizable, and the metaphysical horror of confronting the body's absolute vulnerability to cruel tides of time.

The insects and moths that recur throughout (an obsessive symbol for both me and the genre) belong to that unsettling category of life which seems simultaneously fragile and repulsive to some. Moths in particular carry an association with darkness, decay, metamorphosis, and an attraction toward that which may destroy them. Their presence feels inseparable from the preoccupation with compulsive desire: the instinct to approach what one knows, somewhere beneath consciousness, one ought to flee. The moth is a creature of doomed attraction, circling endlessly around an illumination that offers no salvation.

The monsters of Silent Hill 2 are perhaps the expression of the conviction that psychological suffering can acquire anatomy. The design of them is taking form from our impulses, memories, fears, and desires. The armless figures evoke the helplessness of the bedridden body; the four-legged monsters and nurses have an almost fetishistic visual of sexual frustration and objectification. They are caught being the victim and the monstrous. This is essential to the game's psychosexual horror. These silhouettes seem to suggest that sexuality, vulnerability, shame, and violence have become impossible to disentangle. Sexual desire, as Bataille states it, is inseparable from death. Maria has the most complicated position within this psychosexual idea. She is a woman, a fantasy, resurrection, projection, temptation, the monstrous-feminine.

Silent Hill doesn’t let us taste the catharsis of action horror, such as RE. Killing a monster feels saddening to me because they themselves feel like manifestations of suffering, breeding eternal misery for both James and the Other. Pyramid Head is masculinity stripped of everything except violence, authority, and judgment. He evokes the archetype of the executioner and the Grim Reaper: an impersonal figure who does not negotiate with the condemned because his function is to enact judgment. Yet Pyramid Head is not James's executioner. He is James's own capacity for punishment given a body. Even before James takes the sword, we know he is Him.

Beneath its deeply personal horror lies an older, stranger mythology, which is the occult history of Silent Hill. Abrahamic visuals; execution, condemnation, infernal spaces, the imagery of divine or cosmic judgment, all collide with occult traditions within Silent Hill's mythology. We don’t really get a cleanly defined theology. This ambiguity is essential to worldbuilding. Silent Hill's supernatural mythology does not explain away the psychological horror. I would say that it gives horror a cosmological measure. Everything becomes a mirror of the other. Silent Hill is suspended between supernatural secrets and psychological projection, but the true nature of this place is shadowy and vague, if the truth of anything is even possible to understand.

Of course, I have to mention Akira Yamaoka's music, as its melodies drift through Silent Hill with such tenderness and unease. One of my favourite pastimes is taking a peaceful walk listening to this hauntingly beautiful soundtrack.

10/10 in all regards! <3