The Poppies of Terra #74 - Making a Mountain out of a Silent Hill

When does the echo seek its source?

When does the dream hunger after the dreamer?

Some twenty years ago, on Sunday, June 4th, 2006, I walked into my then local family discount movie theatre (the Woodbridge 5 in Irvine), which played films a little later than regular movie houses, and I caught the 9:30 pm showing of a horror film titled Silent Hill. 

I had no familiarity with the franchise’s lore, and I’m not sure I even realized, at the time, that the film was a video game adaptation. I’d seen the poster, and the title intrigued me. That was enough.

The experience was incantatory and disturbing, in the best possible way.

I didn’t know anyone else who’d seen the movie, and back in 2006 film discourse online wasn’t anywhere what it is today. Fragments of the film’s imagery and music stuck with me, gradually peeling off from the story and taking on their own symbolic resonance as story sediments.

Fast forward to 2012. Recollecting the chilly feeling of Silent Hill much more than its oneiric plot, on November 4th, at the AMC Orange 30, I watched Silent Hill: Revelation. The 12:15 am showing (technically making it a Sunday again) seemed apt for the return to a fictive world whose twilight nature, in my mind, eclipsed its own reality as a movie. This time I found the proceedings mostly perplexing and crude. Emerging bleary-eyed from the screening room around 2 am, I chose to believe in the unreality of the situation rather than subjecting it to the rigors of taste or logic. 

On Thursday, January 22nd, 2026, I attended the 5:50 pm showing of the new Silent Hill outing at the Irvine Spectrum. I deliberately didn’t rewatch either of the first two movies, preferring instead to tap into their wraith-like residues in my memory.

Alas, it didn’t help. 

The spell has been broken.

Now, in preparation for this piece, I’ve finally gone back and revisited the first two hauntings. What I’ve been most surprised by is how these movies repurpose other story structures, subtly morphing and reshaping them for their own nefarious purposes.

Before we talk about Return to Silent Hill, join me on a brief historical detour (spoilers ahead).

1. Silent Hill (dir. Christophe Gans, 2006)

If you had to name a movie of which these story beats seem reminiscent, what would it be?

• A girl whose disturbing behavior and visions are the symptom of a supernatural possession/infestation tied to a wider religious cosmology

• A desperate mother who seeks help for this girl, her daughter

• The parent’s quest moving from medical/earthly explanations toward confronting a religious apparatus and literalized spiritual evil

• A bloody ritual-set climax where the child’s body is the battleground of purity and divine manifestation

I’m thinking The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973). Once you glimpse the structural similarities, they’re hard to un-see, and they help to explain the lingering effect of the original Silent Hill movie adaptation. 

There’s a couple of other noteworthy horror pictures that I think feed into the mix. The Wicker Man (dir. Robin Hardy, 1973), like Silent Hill, featured a protagonist investigating a mysterious town or community controlled by a fanatical religious cult, and likewise dealt with themes of ritual sacrifice and paganism. Jacob’s Ladder (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1990) shares the psychological horror aspect of shifting between surreal and normal realities, with a traumatized protagonist who is ill-equipped to navigate the transitions.

We shouldn’t ignore the video game’s specific Japanese roots, so let’s do one more for good measure.

What does this bring to mind?

• An abused psychic girl as the origin of a curse

• The child’s rage structuring a contagious, experiential revenge space

• An investigation by our protagonist into the psychic girl’s past, thereby witnessing the abuse

• The protagonist’s actions deciphering the psychic girl’s lore and making the curse fully manifest as a means of retribution

I think the connection is clear: The Ring (dir. Hideo Nakata, 1998: Gore Verbinski, 2002). In Silent Hill, Alessa is the psychically gifted child horrifically abused by adults whose pain fuels the town’s hellish Otherworld and perpetual punishment of the cult. In The Ring, Sadako/Samara is the psychically gifted girl abused, confined, and finally murdered by a parent, her rage crystallizing into a curse that forces others to experience her trauma and die. ​Alessa’s vengeance traps the cult in an alternate dimension mirroring her pain, with punishments specifically keyed to her abuse (e.g. the burnings, flaying, etc). Meanwhile, Samara’s videotape compels its viewers to see encoded fragments of her life and agony, then die after a fixed period, spreading her suffering like a sickness. Rose’s investigation into Sharon leads her into Alessa’s past and pain, ushering her into becoming the instrument of Alessa’s revenge in the church massacre, while Rachel in The Ring uncovers the history of Sadako/Samara’s abuse, descending into wells, archives, and family secrets before the curse is revealed.

If you’re going to make a horror movie based on a video game, you could do a lot worse than borrowing an Exorcist-like template onto which you graft elements of The Wicker Man, Jacob’s Ladder, and The Ring.

The first Silent Hill film knows how to repurpose these inspirations meaningfully, and a major reason it works is that the fundamental premise of a concerned parent, and a secondary concerned co-parent, are shown in a mostly believable, experientially visceral way. 

2. Silent Hill: Revelation (dir. M. J. Bassett, 2012)

This movie falls apart at about the midpoint, and never quite recovers, so I’m not going to spend as much time on it. But after revisiting it recently I was struck by another clear parallel.

We have:

• A girl with supernatural significance pursued by a religious/occult cult

• A cult that wants to use her as a prophesied vessel

• Protective caregivers on the run

• A “chosen one” destiny tied to an impending divine/demonic birth

• A climax built around preventing the cult’s ritual from bringing their godlike power fully into the world

Hello Bless the Child (dir. Chuck Russell, 2000). Granted, the tones are quite different, but once more, the basic skeleton bears a notable resemblance. I’d say that Labyrinth (dir. Jim Henson, 1986) is also an interesting precursor, in the way it features a young person venturing into a nightmarish otherworld to rescue someone they love.

All of which brings us to the latest film.

3. Return to Silent Hill (dir. by the series’ cinematic pioneer, Christophe Gans, 2026).

I won’t delay my impression of the new release any longer. As a film, Return to Silent Hill fails.

Its characters are flat, their motivations barely sketched-in cliches. What are supposed to be hard-hitting emotional revelations land with the dull, wet thud of pigeon droppings, and the story is both undercooked and overdetermined, with constant psychoanalytic explanations of sequences that barely make sense because the film we’re seeing and the film we’re being told we’re watching are two completely different entities.

Jeremy Irvine as protagonist James Sunderland and Hannah Emily Anderson as his tragic love interest Mary Crane are done no favors by stiff direction and inane, repetitive dialogue. During what is supposed to be their meet-cute, we’re treated to this scintillating exchange:

Mary: “I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

James: “So what are you gonna do?”

Mary: “Just head back into town, I guess.”

That’s a lot of guessing for the first few minutes of any film, let alone a horror experience from which we expect polish, self-assurance and panache. The movie’s fealty to its video game origins makes it feel airless and foregone. Unlike the game it's based on, we are relegated to the role of spectators. Its cinematic language should immerse us in a world of tortured souls and nightmare dimensional crossings; instead, it prosaically shuttles us along from one dreary sequence to another. We witness an accumulation of individually self-same scenes–James discovers a new horror or side character, barely reacts, is hunted by a threat, and either escapes or succumbs to it–that fail to build on each other or cohere into a larger narrative arc. Meanwhile, a dozen flashbacks attempt to fill in the proceedings with “meaning,” but it all comes too late, and at right angles to the creepy tableaux. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a movie with this density of gross and grotesque yet utterly non-scary imagery. It’s an eloquent reminder that in order to evoke fear, storytellers must first arouse interest and curiosity.

As I shuffled out of the movie theater with a friend and a dozen other listless patrons, I started thinking about the basic plot engine of Return to Silent Hill. 

What does this remind you of?

• A guilt-ridden protagonist confronts a manifestation of a dead lover

• The dead lover returns but isn’t quite real, an uncanny reproduction yet fundamentally different

• The protagonist must confront whether to accept or reject this impossible second chance

• A mysterious force/place creates personalized psychological manifestations

• The ending involves a loop or return to an earlier moment in the story

Yep, I’m also thinking Solaris (dir. Tarkovsky, 1972: Soderbergh, 2002). In Solaris, the ocean creates physical copies of the deceased wife, while here Maria appears as a doppelganger of Mary. Guilt over the loved one’s death drives the narrative, with Kelvin’s wife’s suicide (which he feels responsible for) mirroring James’ actions in relation to Mary. James declaring he doesn’t need Maria parallels Kelvin’s struggle with his wife’s visitor, with the Solaris ocean creating these visitors based on memories in a way that’s akin to Silent Hill sourcing Maria and other figures from James’ psyche. Both films end with ambiguous scenes suggesting a mixture of acceptance, delusion, and being trapped in a cycle. And, of course, the abandoned, fog-covered Silent Hill functions similarly to the space station orbiting Solaris, providing a sense of isolation of entrapment. 

The key difference, besides the fact that Tarkovsky’s Solaris is a masterpiece, is that either movie version of Solaris knows how to manage its tone, declaring itself through its aesthetics as a philosophical musing on memory, consciousness, and what makes someone “real.” A fundamental problem with Return to Silent Hill is James’ unreliability as a narrator, which leaves us completely adrift in an unreal world. The fact that his grief has numbed him, and that he therefore doesn’t show the kinds of reactions to horrific situations we might expect a human being to display, compounds the movie’s inability to suspend our disbelief.

Speaking of James’ unreliability as a point-of-view character, another much better filmic precedent, also adapting a novel, springs to mind.

What does this make you think of?

• A guilt-ridden man investigating a mystery tied to a woman he loved

• A fog-and storm-shrouded locale structured around his psychiatric breakdown

• Key characters revealed as facets of his psyche 

• A climactic hospital confrontation that reframes the entire narrative as a constructed therapeutic scenario rather than a straightforward supernatural quest.

Enter Shutter Island (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010).

At an even more basic level, the new film isalso channeling the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Clearly, originality isn’t this franchise’s strong suit. But as the first film demonstrated, it’s not necessary to evoke feelings of dread.

I’ve talked about Return to Silent Hill’s failings. Where it succeeds, and even intrigues, is in its flirtation with something far more abstract and untethered than what it gives itself permission ultimately to be. “I’m not looking at ‘Silent Hill’ only as a great video game,” said the director in a recent interview. “I’m looking at it as a piece of modern art. It has something really edgy and experimental.”

Yes. Yes! That’s what I was hoping for this third time around.

The fundamental imagery is in place. Ash that falls endlessly connotes an unnatural process, for in our world fires burn up their fuel, but the one in Silent Hill, consuming mysterious underground sources, goes on forever. Fog and mist occlude reality itself. Sirens blare with deadening, repetitive urgency, instinctively spurring the realm’s twitching, armless and faceless denizens, along with hordes of overgrown insects, into mad sprawls of endlessly pointless activity. Scattered survivors scurry in dark, dilapidated buildings; blind nurses freeze holding suture scissors and trauma shears, and a hypertrophied half-man, half-Pyramid clanging drags an absurdly unwieldy knife down long corridors.

And to the director’s credit, the production and set design, along with many of the practical effects, are excellent.

What would bring all this material to life is the space to fully inhabit its own nigh-inexplicable weirdness. Imagine this as a kind of abstract art exhibit. A Skinamarink-esque take on the curse film of The Ring, idling in the unlit corners where unspeakable and inscrutable horrors lurk. But rather than being directed as a Lynchian kaleidoscope of phantasmagoria, Gans has chosen to render his screenplay with the precision and mechanical predictability of a Hitchcockian thriller. Cinematically, the means here strangle the ends. During the two decades that have passed since he made the first movie, horror audiences have become more savvy. Plus, we still have that first film. There’s nowhere to go with the new one because we know exactly where we are.

Not being a gamer, but wanting to absorb more of the mythology informing Return to Silent Hill, I sought out the English-language translation of Sadamu Yamashita’s novelization of Silent Hill 2, the game from which much of the new movie is drawn, and read it over the course of several hours. I forgive the novel’s messiness and even sense of unfinishedness, because it is precisely that liminality which helps to animate its substance.  

So we return to the questions I asked at the start of this piece, answers firmly in hand.

Return to Silent Hill is the echo in search of a voice, the dream seeking the dreamer.

And one day, perhaps, if we’re lucky, it’ll once again merge with its richer shadow self.