In Silent Hill, originally billed as psychological horror, the roles are muddier. The latter presents a conventional heroic narrative, with the player-characters unambiguously coded as righteous saviours who must eradicate the evil represented by the zombies to restore symbolic order. Alongside Capcom’s Resident Evil, the title helped popularise the survival horror genre of action thrillers, which are characterised by tense exploration, expressionistic camera angles, fiendish environmental puzzles and limited access to weaponry, making every encounter with a monster a mortal challenge.īut the differences between Silent Hill and Resident Evil are profound.
In fact, it’s the setup to the classic video game Silent Hill, launched on this day 20 years ago by the Japanese gaming company Konami. Loaded with dread, this scene could be the opening of a nasty horror movie. Shocked and confused, he staggers into the nearby town of Silent Hill, where his nightmare truly begins.
As the man regains consciousness, he realises the car is a wreck and his daughter is missing. A father and daughter are driving through a remote area of America when a ghostly figure steps into the road, forcing the car to swerve wildly.
