BLOOD,
GORE
AND
KEYPAD
DOORS
SILENT HILL HOMECOMING AND THE STRANGE
NEAR-DEATH OF SURVIVAL HORROR
22
NICK BROWN
H
orror, as a genre and as
an emotion, is a complicated beast. What frightens
one person will fail to make
another feel anything. It could
even make them laugh. Like
many genres, Horror genre
has become increasingly
complicated in its forms and
definitions. Is a work part of
the meaninglessness-confirming Cosmic Horror group?
Or the blood-soaked, chainsaw-bearing Splatter Horror?
What about the dark shadows
and long halls of Gothic Horror? Or the experiments and
test tubes of Sci-Fi Horror? But
we’re here for one beast, the
most famous of them all, and
arguably the first to appear in
video games: Survival Horror.
Survival Horror is about
desperation. It is about someone being placed in impossible, deadly circumstances. It
is about humanity outmatched
and outgunned. You cannot fight the monster under
your bed, there are few if
any weapons to bring to bear
against it.
This particular brand of horror died down for a few years
in favour of its long-standing
rival, Action Horror. The release of games like Amnesia:
The Dark Descent and Slender: The Arrival (yeah, survival
horror has a thing for colons)
helped to change that, but
not before plenty of bland,
violent “horror” games were
released. Survival Horror is
now popular, and, more importantly, profitable.
But why am I telling you
about this, instead of Silent
Hil? Well, context. You need
to know the environment this
game was made in, if you
want to understand how this
thing came to be and why it
went so badly wrong.
Silent Hill is, along with
Resident Evil, one of the series
most commonly credited with
the creation of modern video
game horror. It wasn’t the first
– that award probably goes
to Alone in the Dark – but it
was certainly one of the series
to put the genre really into the
mainstream. Silent Hill 2 and
its sequel show up on not just
“Top Horror Games” lists, but
Top Games period.
But this game wasn’t made
by the people who created
those games.
Konami, in its infinite wisdom, decided to dissolve that
group and have them work
instead as app developers.
Instead, they gave development rights to Double Helix, a
new studio with nothing to do
with the first four instalments. It
should be indicative of what
was to come that Double Helix’s most notable creations
afterwards were Killer Instinct
and the Green Lantern game.
In case you’ve come in the
wrong door, Silent Hill is an
evil, haunted town that acts as
a sort of proving ground for
people – usually sinners – to
overcome. It draws people to
it and uses their past traumas
and regrets against them, conjuring symbolic monsters and