Hacker Cinema
Silent Hill
2006 · Film · 125 min
Directed by Christophe Gans
Rose, a desperate mother, takes her adopted daughter, Sharon, to the town of Silent Hill in an attempt to cure her of her ailment. After a violent car crash, Sharon disappears, and Rose embarks on a horrific journey to get her back and begins to uncover the truth behind the apocalyptic disaster that burned the town 30 years earlier.
3 positive9 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
Graphic novels and manga qualify as media mail ("books"), but smaller comic books do not.
RPG books (Dungeons & Dragons) qualify as media mail ("books"), but boxed RPGs (Dungeons & Dragons) do not (except for book sets.)
Movies (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.) qualify as media mail ("film") while games (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, etc.) do not.
Optical discs of educational software are permitted, but "video games" are not. It isn't clear to me which side educational games fall on.
This is incorrect —- American horror novels, particularly those by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, are the primary inspiration for Silent Hill. The game tips it’s hand on this —- many, if not all, of the streets in the first game are named after the authors (and in the case of King, they used his Bachmann pseudonym).
That said, the Centralia fire is a primary inspiration for the 2006 film adaptation of Silent Hill.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1549948454272925697
Centralia, PA which is mentioned in the article, is also the inspiration for the town in the Silent Hill games/movie. The real-life town has been burning for 60 years at this point, and it's estimated that it could burn for up to 250 years.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
Oh yeah I think these games, running from security guards/police and other crazy as hell experiences in my youth broke my amygdala or something. I regularly get into the most messed up, near-death situations and laugh them off cause at least it's not like I have pyramid head coming after me.
For some reason I've noticed that in Nicaragua families really like watching horror flicks together, it's like part of the culture there for some reason. I was watching the silent hill movie with one and they actually didn't know it was originally a video game.
Pyramid head sounds like a fun halloween costume for next year, a friend of mine went as a nurse from that last time. Can do it with some cardboard boxes I think.
There are many things to say (and I do agree with the author) but unfortunately that conversation is going to bring out people who think Doom is scarier than Silent Hill because there are more jump scares in Doom and too much reading and personal trauma in Silent Hill.
It's like when you are under 15 and watching a movie where a character gets raped or another has an abortion. The reality will only hit you later in life and that story won't be as easy to watch.
It's like that episode from DS9 where Captain Sisko tells his son his writing is dull because his son doesn't know what he is writing about and Siskok encourages him to write about matters he knows.
Or in Good will Hunting, when the psychotherapist explains to Will something along the line of "you can deconstruct my psyche and analyze it but you don't know jack about it".
Likewise some games that were recently acclaimed for their approach to the subject (Celeste, Old man's journey, Sea of solitude) really fell dull to me.
By consequence, I mean, you have some sort of reason to want to avoid death. Amnesia as I recall had very frequent checkpoints, and dying set you back a minute or so, only to encounter the same scare puzzle shortly after. Doing the same scene twice in the same pattern breaks any immersion (which is, again, a very difficult problem to solve in game design). One of the design principles in the movie Alien was that you do not want to show the monster. I think that's a good rule, and is doubly true in games where death means you do it again. An enemy you can only hide from is cool, but frustrating when said enemy follows a scripted pattern and its secretly a puzzle rather than something where you actually feel like you're hiding from a being (Alien Isolation does this well). Haunted hayride is a good descriptor. Resident evil and silent hill have tried to tackle this problem by inducing resource scarcity. Most scary encounters will not kill you, but they'll force you to expend resources which make you feel more hopeless about the future. It's far from perfect but it sort of works. It is vulnerable to players taking the opposite mentality, whereby they purposefully die to try and clear sections with lower resource loss.
Silent hill games (the good ones...) aren't action games btw. Most people consider the second one to be best psychological horror game ever made.
Horror's pretty dope these days. Next Resident Evil lookin slick https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSapXD9vxYA
They have, silent hill. All the other bad game movies, doom, the later resident evils, and super mario bros really didn't tap in on what made those games great in the movies. They just parroted the story and hope it would translate well.
There have been good video game movies, but the number is vanishingly small. Many are "so bad it's good" such as anything Uwe Boll makes, but there are a couple that seem to be created by directors who genuinely love the source material and take it in interesting directions (e.g. the first Silent Hill film, the first Resident Evil film, arguably Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within).
Also, Mortal Kombat (1995) is a good film.
Been there, theres not a lot to see beyond the fire station and a memorial to veterans. I first heard about it in an article about the movie Silent Hill and how the producers discovered a town that was covered in fog like the fictional city. There is actually a pretty cool This American Life episode about it: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/59/fire
Well, it sounds weird for me that place with at least 300 years history you refer as "nothing interesting". To name just two completely different things to visit - place of battle of Gettysburg and village used to film Silent Hill (Centralia) - just to start with.
If you are more into hacking, I also don't know why you asking advice, you should have pretty good idea of what you havent touched yet but want to.
I thought silent hill was quite good, probably due to less rigid 'canon' allowing for flexibility in characters and story. Admittedly, this would make it the exception and not the rule. I also think this means that Half Life/Portal would not translate well into a movie.
And the inspiration for the movie Silent Hill.