Silent Hill Sunday #5: "Sins of the Decaying Flesh"

Open wide and say "AHHHHHHHHH!"

If you’ve played any Silent Hill game without using your joystick to poke out your eyes to avert your gaze from the freakish, unspeakable horrors forevermore, you’ve no doubt come face to faceless with the bloodthirsty nurses who roam the 12,000 hospitals of the horrible nightmare town and the moderately terrifying surrounding areas. Though the Silent Hill series doesn’t have a true “mascot” (though Robbie the Rabbit was trying pretty hard for a while) for many players, the nurse has become as iconic and representative of the series as Super Mario’s moustache, Simon Belmont’s whip, or Cloud’s stupid, stupid amnesia.

By Mark Rivera

You might not notice it when you first encounter them because you’re concentrating on 1.) running away and 2.) regaining you ability to control your own bladder, but those nurses are absolutely dripping with sex – just not the good kind. Like everything in the series, Silent Hill serves up its own bizarre and frightening take on eroticism and femininity, equating it with pain and torture. Yes, I know; that’s all been done before, but not quite like this.

Medical professionals are meant to heal, but these nurses dispense violence and, judging by their shaky swagger, they themselves look ill. We should be horrified of them, yet their short skirts and smooth legs draw the eye whether you want to look or not, and were they not concealed in a bloodstained nurse’s blouse, their ample chests might be just what you look for while people watching at the mall. The nurses’ erotic essence is undeniable, and yet many of us push it out of our minds and feel ashamed when we think about it.

And perhaps rightfully so: Silent Hill is telling us that disgust and revoltion are attractive, that pain is pleasure, and that sex can and should be anonymous. The nurses represent sexual repression and/or frustration for many SH protagonists – James, Travis and Alex stand out the most – but they also represent the player’s sexual frustration and repression as well. Look but don’t touch. Looking is bad, so touching must be worse. Kill but don’t touch. Eradicate deviant desire.

The Silent Hill series is brilliant in the way it toys with the player, like making him or her want to sleep in a suit of armor – you know, just in case. But holding a mirror up to consumers and forcing them to deal with their own dark desires is what makes Silent Hill so deeply personal and enduring, long after the survival horror genre as it existed in the late ‘90s had become passé. The nightmare town nurses encompass everything the Silent Hill series has come to stand for, so it only makes sense that their striking sexual persona has come to represent the franchise itself.

And that’s something Robbie the Rabbit could never do …unless you’re into that kind of thing.

I'm scared.

Silent Hill Sunday #4: “Time Heals Most Wounds with Silent Hill 3”

In retrospect, Silent Hill 3 is a pretty decent game and an acceptable addition to the SH series. But when it was released in 2003, I utterly despised it.

The problem certainly didn’t lie in the gameplay. The original Silent Hill formula still had some life at this point, and just like games the game before it, SH3 features your main character running around, bashing or shooting horrifying monsters and solving crazy puzzles. Anemic amounts of ammo create tense and often frustrating situations, and as a result, this game is a little shorter, but much harder than Silent Hill 2.

There’s a lot of evil eye candy in this game, starting with the smooth and disturbing textures. In fact, sometimes Silent Hill 3 feels like a demented Pixar movie – think Toy Story as directed by Tim Burton and Stanley Kubric. The trademark Silent Hill blood and iron motif returns, along with a healthy dose of “who turned out the lights?” The character models are no less impressive: For example, the main character, Heather, looks and acts like a typical teenage girl. She’s not overly attractive and the game doesn’t focus on her chest, which adds a bit of realism and believability to the mix.

In a surprising move, Konami bundled the North American version of the game with a special soundtrack CD. You might be wondering why they did it, and the answer is simple: The music of Silent Hill 3 rules. The rockin’ intro tune retains that classic Silent Hill vibe and pumps you up before you play, and the in-game music is as creepy as ever. The ending theme, “Hometown,” is a remix of the original Silent Hill theme, and it’s apparently performed by a cross between a drunken David Bowie and the guy who sits next to you every week at church who can’t quite sing, but belts out all the hymns regardless. That must seem awful to anyone reading this – and it is – but somehow it grows on you, I promise. In the same vein, the only real problem with the sound effects is the silly, annoying noises the monsters make. Instead of scaring you, they simply get on your nerves – especially the teeth-grinding buzz of bug monsters.

Silent Hill 3 suffers from a bit of what I call “Symphony of the Night Syndrome” in the voice department. Heather and Vincent sound fine, but Douglas and everyone else are another story all together. Apparently Douglas owes much of his performance to the Silent Hill cue card company, but they didn’t do a good job directing him, because it sounds like he’s reading his lines from signs that are positioned several miles away and written in yellow crayon: That is to day, one… word… at… a… time.

The same tank-like survival horror control scheme that had been in place since the first Resident Evil makes yet another appearance in Silent Hill 3, and it can be a handful for those who have never played a Silent Hill title before. Sometimes it’s hard to turn around to attack an enemy, accounting for a few otherwise unnecessary deaths and an easy to perform, but fairly useless blocking maneuver will be ignored by all but the most seasoned gamers. Perhaps most frustrating is the fact that several thousand hours of your life will be wasted trying to pick up an object that’s right in front of you.

So if the graphics and sound are both stellar and control is workable, what made my younger self want to toss Silent Hill 3 down the nearest swear grate? As a stand alone experience it’s fine, but when compared to the rest of the series up to that point, the third Silent Hill game feels like a pale rehash of what we’ve already seen in the first two games. The original Silent Hill is a masterpiece of blood and terror. The second in the series loses much of that fear factor, but the masterful storyline is rich in symbolism and intrigue. Silent Hill 3 is neither. Some monsters are scary, but the others are just laughable, like the marshmallow-like “Insane Cancers” that chill the player to the bone with their horrific ability to look like clowns. The storyline takes a major hit as well, eschewing the Silent Hill tradition of forcing the player to complete the game at least one more time to fully grasp the narrative. Much of the fun of the Silent Hill series is trying to crack the unanswered questions, but Silent Hill 3 gives you everything you could have wondered on a silver platter at the end, while simultaneously cheapening the creepy mythos established by the first game.

If you’re a rabid Silent Hill fan, no doubt you’ve already finished Silent Hill 3 about 35 times since its release in 2003. You’ve already formed you opinions and put the game back on your shelf to rot. Like me you might have been upset with the comparatively simplistic story, and also like me, you might have gotten over it in the last half decade or so. But those of us who aren’t obsessed fanboys and have never played the game before will find a fun and somewhat scary adventure in Silent Hill 3.

"Okay, but only if you push me next."

Silent Hill Sunday #2: "Daddy, Help Me! Daddy, Where are You!?"

A lot of video games are simply a fun diversion from the pressures of a stressful existence, but every once in a while, a game comes along that changes the way players look at the world or even the way they live their lives. Street Fighter II brought a host of new words to American lexicon, from the “Hadoken” fireball to the rising “Shoryuken” punch; hundreds of teens across the nation started taking guitar lessons after the advent of the Guitar Hero series (and almost as many kids, to their parents’ dismay, gave up in the first week); and thanks to a little game called Pokémon, obsessive children everywhere have been battling trading card addictions for more than a decade.

In my own experience, something I generally didn’t enjoy before playing the original Silent Hill title for PlayStation was urinating in my pants. However, I’ve taken to wetting myself rather frequently when behind the controls of this game. The first Silent Hill was literally the scariest media experience of my life and I know there are plenty of people who, after they wash the pee out of their trousers, would agree with me. After the horrors of Silent Hill, other “scary” things lose their punch. For example, for SH veterans, The Exorcist might as well have taken place in a McDonald’s ballpit and starred Pee Wee Herman as Fr. Damian.

In Silent Hill, Players take control of mystery author and hopelessly aloof father Harry Mason as he trudges through demon-concealing fog, abandoned amusement parks filled with author-chewing claw creatures, and a lizard-infested sewer that somehow manages to be a reprieve from the action up to that point. The voice acting is horrendous, but that seems to have been a staple in Konami games of the era – just look at Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Besides, nothing adds to the gut-churning tension of situation like a man delivering his lines with all the bravado of someone trying to decide what condiments to squeeze onto his tuna fish sandwich.

During his pleasant stay in the resort town of Silent Hill, Harry has a hard time searching for his missing daughter, Cheryl, who has short black hair and just turned seven last week. But he has a much easier time finding mighty truckloads of blood splashed on the walls, fleshless bodies hanging in bathroom stalls, thousands of yards of barbed wire and probably a roomful of all the teachers who ever berated you in elementary school, though I have yet to find it. And when the sirens sound, it’s a sign to the player to put down the controller and dash from the room, because things are going to get a whole lot more rusty and stabful in about 20 seconds.

Silent Hill is the typical father loses daughter, father looks for daughter, daughter merges with demonic alter ego and attempts to devour everyone around her kind of story, so there’s really no need to go into plot details since it’s such a cliché narrative. However, whether you’re running from misshapen alien children with sharp, sharp knives; or running from pterodactyls with player-rending talons; or even running from faceless zombie nurses that confuse your neither regions with their unholy mix of sex and death, there is but one thing you must remember: Never trust the Silent Hill manual.

For example, when describing the knife that Harry finds in the first few minutes of the game, the manual says it’s a “weak weapon but better than nothing.” The phrase “better than nothing” implies that one would be better off with the weapon than without it. This is not true. Any fool who attempts to use the knife will find himself flailing wildly, missing every attack and basically offering himself up to the enemy as a sort of well-educated but poorly-spoken flesh meal. Assuming that after months of practice you find a way to actually hit things with the knife, you’ll soon see that your kitchen cutlery inflicts approximately as much damage as a disappointing bedtime story. If it had been up to me, I’d have replaced the knife with an adult toy. It would have been just as effective as a weapon and few can deny the entertainment value of a man battling the forces of evil with a vibrating pseudo-phallus.

The manual also says that the iron pipe weapon is “harder to use” than the knife. Wrong again, manual! Last time I checked, whacking someone with three feet of cold metal is easier than getting close enough to stab them with a dull knife (or an adult toy as the case may be). The same is true in Silent Hill: Killing monsters is better than not killing them and getting your spleen torn out in the process. The more I think about it, the more it looks like the manual wants you to fail.

Let’s see if you were playing attention though taking a quick quiz. Pretend that the Silent Hill manual says that multi-grain fiber bread is an excellent tool for keeping Harry healthy and regular. When you find multi-grain fiber bread in the game, you should:

A. Eat it immediately to restore lost health and/or put an end to irregularity.

B. Toss it at the nearest enemy in hopes of causing damage.

C. Throw it away before it explodes, destroying your television set and blasting shrapnel into your tender eyeballs.

If you picked A, you’re an idiot.

You used the knife, didn't you?

Spend Saturday the 14th with LJN’s Friday the 13th

Back before Resident Evil, Silent Hill and even Sweet Home were around to give us restless dreams; before Alone in the Dark kept PC gamers up at night; and before terrifying gamers was a good business model; there was Friday the 13th on the NES. It’s not too surprising that this game is actually scarier than the cheesy movies – after all, they were less about genuine scares and more about watching a mentally challenged zombie in a hockey mask off camp counselors in creative and sometimes decorative ways. But this frightful NES game actually puts you in the shoes of an unfortunate group of would-be victims out to destroy Jason – if they can. The other reason it’s so scary is that it’s one of the worst games ever made. It’s frustrating, ugly and boring. And yet, I adore it. Go figure.

Lovingly thrown together in a single afternoon by LJN, the one-time leader in crappy movie-based video games, Friday the 13th is often berated for its repetitive gameplay, unclear objectives and face-melting difficulty. These are all valid criticisms; but what most half-hearted, bash-fest reviewers don’t care to admit is that once you get the hang of things, Friday the 13th for Nintendo becomes a horrifying search-and-destroy mission that’s likely to leave players cowering under their beds in broad daylight.

The story is simple: Jason’s angry and murdering children again, because that’s what he does best, and it’s up to six similarly-dressed camp counselors to rescue the camp’s 54 children and annihilate the man behind the mask. Friday the 13th was the first true survivor horror game: The only goal, aside from trashing Jason, is to make it out alive. Encounters with Jason leave you paranoid because you’re always terrified that he’ll jump out at you in the woods and kill your character. It’s a game of cat and mouse, only the player is never really sure whether they’re the cat or the mouse.


The nine-second tunes that play over and over again in the field, in the cabins and at the character select screen are unnecessarily repetitive even for NES standards. But there’s more than meets the ear going on here: LJN must have spent millions researching how to convert tension into musical form, and the seconds-long riffs that populate the F13 world are the malicious fruit of that labor of hundreds of mad scientists and psychotic dentists. The music is one of the key factors in making Friday the 13th as scary as it is. For those of us who played it as children, this game still provides the soundtrack for our deepest nightmares to this day.


Take on Friday the 13th if you think you can handle it (and its crappy gameplay). Look at it this way, either you’ll defeat Jason, or, to quote the game:

Silent Hill Sunday #1: Next Stop, the Nightmare Town

You wake up sweating and disoriented. Sitting up, your gaze darts wildly about the surrounding area. Then, your heart beat lessens, the terror leaves you, and you let out a sigh of relief. There you are, in your own bed. The only remnants of your nightmare are the now-cold puddle of sweat you’re sitting in, foggy memories of an unpleasant being, and a vague feeling of unease. By the time you’re in the bathroom, brushing your teeth, your mind is already on something else. For you, the nightmare is over.

Now try to imagine a world where the nightmare is never over; a world of constant fear, where you’re already awake, and dying is the only release. Yet, even death may not bring the relief you seek, for what awaits you afterwards may be even worse. This is the curse of Silent Hill.

Since the original title on the PlayStation was unleashed on the unsuspecting gaming public, the Silent Hill series has been terrifying players around the world for more than a decade. After the first two critically acclaimed games and a respectable third entry into the series, Konami’s outings into the nightmare town became increasingly stale and formulaic, despite new gameplay elements introduced to each successive title. While Silent Hill games once required an overdose of tranquilizers and a good therapist to complete, entries like Silent Hill Origins, the sixth game in the main series, inspired as much terror a typical Syfy channel flick on a Saturday afternoon.

However, the recent Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on the Wii shook up the series’ gameplay by removing combat entirely and adding motion controls. Many players think this was the kick in the pants the series needed to revive an ailing franchise. The eighth Silent Hill game is due out in 2011, for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Regardless of the quality of the gameplay in later entries, the soundtrack for each of the seven games in the series is varied and creepy, incorporating the tag team of Japanese composer Akira Yamoaka and, from the third game on, American singer Mary Elizabeth McGlynn. Yamoaka reportedly will not be producing the music for the next Silent Hill game; taking over the reigns will be Daniel Licht, the music composer for Showtime’s Dexter.

In celebration of a series that took survival horror to such terrifying highs and drab lows, allow me to introduce Silent Hill Sundays here at Wordsmith VG. At least two Sundays a month, I’ll write about a different aspect of the Silent Hill series, from reviews to theories to little-known SH tidbits.

Coming up next: “Have you seen a little girl? Short, black hair. She just turned seven.”