Move trailer looks alright. I wasn’t as excited as you guys, but it seems decent.
Prediction: The story will suck, everything else will be perfect.
Hope I’m half-wrong.
The whole thing will suck?
Me too. Saw the trailer on the big screen before Underworld:Evolution, along with the trailers for four or five other horror movies. SH was the best of the bunch by far.
The trailer for this looked great. I’m also glad that Uwe Boll isn’t in the director’s seat.
I like Christophe Gans, I like Roger Avery, and I believe Akira Yamaoka did at least some of the music, so I’m pretty optimistic that this’ll be worth watching. The talent’s there.
Lies. The last three games made plenty of sense. You have to give them some thought, admittedly, but they make sense, and they’re often just as frightening as the original. SH2 is probably the most frightening game in the series these days.
SH2: establishing what Silent Hill is post-Harry. It’s a magnet for sinners.
SH3: direct sequel to Silent Hill, going off of the good ending.
SH4: bizarre murder mystery.
All the games actually hang together very well and very thematically if you sit down and think about it. I’d happily hold court about it, but that’d necessitate a move to the Games forum.
I have to side with Tom. The first game used mood to create fear. The others tried to use the grotesque, which is a different approach. Well, the first one used that a bit, but it wasn’t the focus.
Out of all the games, Silent Hill 1 definitely had the scariest music, and it was used to great effect.
The most frightening moment for me was in Silent Hill 1. You’ve been through the school and seen some of the Otherworld. Now you move to the hospital which is creepy enough in the regular world. You explore all three levels and the basement and get back in the elevator. At that point there is now a button to level 4. It wasn’t there before. There’s no fanfare, no real cue other than that the button is there when it wasn’t before.
I didn’t want to hit that button because I knew shit was gonna get ugly if I did. My best friend and I bickered for about 20 minutes over who was going to have to actually be the one to hit it, we were both so scared.
Yeah. Fucking elevators. As soon as I encounter them in the Silent Hill series, the creep meter goes off the fucking scale.
If they have an elevator in the movie, I’m going to be forced to leave the theatre.
There has been a bit of a swing towards the grotesque with the PS2/Xbox installments, but mood and theme are just as paramount as they’ve ever been. They simply work on different sets of emotions, and deal with different mysteries. SH is “where’s the kid and what’s going on?” SH2 is “where’s my wife, is she alive, and what’s going on?” SH3 is “why is this, whatever it is, happening to me?”
If you find being lost in a very big dangerous city while looking for a kid to simply be a scarier scenario, perhaps because you’re a parent yourself, then there’s not much to be done for it, but I don’t feel that SH2 and SH3 are at all lacking compared to the first. Their biggest issues stem from repetition of a central formula.
SH4 is largely considered to be the weakest of the series because it doesn’t really play on any sort of emotional aspect; it tries to, but it’s arguably less than successful. Yamaoka said that SH4 is in large part about what happens when your home slowly turns against you, when a safe place becomes toxic and dangerous, but the game never really makes Henry’s apartment feel “safe.” It always seems cramped, claustrophobic, and ominous, and the sudden appearance of ghosts within it is just fulfilling its promise.
It also doesn’t help that Henry’s particular “adventure” is in no way related to who Henry himself is. He’s an innocent bystander, more or less, and the villain of SH4 is more of a protagonist than he is. James and Heather’s games are much more about who they are.
I didn’t really find Silent Hill 2 very scary because of the pacing. Except for Pyramid Head, who is one of my favorite video game antagonists ever.
Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest games of it’s generation. The story is extremely well thought out and the presentation is top notch. I wish they took the storyline of that one for the movie.
As much as I hate to agree with you on anything, Chas, this does look good. A better version that I’m sure you’ve seen by now is here, just so you know.
I really hope they use Silent Hill 2’s alternate ending for the movie:
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=2225
I hope they keep the song, too.
Silent Hill 1 also had a dog ending I believe.
Advance word is that this is not being screened for critics, which usually indicates it’s a steaming turd.
I would expect that this is a movie that will be so faithful to the games, that most people just wouldn’t enjoy it. I’ve heard that Konami has taken a pretty strong hand in the direction of the movie; all it’ll take is the standard Konami SH characters being emotionally dead, and people will pan the movie for bad acting.
This is one movie I’m going to see regardless of the reviews.
It has Pyramid Head. How could I not see it?
See, if the rest of the game had been like that Silent Hill 2 would have been good instead of superbad.
Several hours of wandering through apartments. The monotany only broken by Pyramid Head raping a monster.