Warning: The following article about Silent Hill contains spoilers.
It was the winter of 2009, and I was at a high school theatre competition with my school in Connecticut. I had brought my PSP along not only because I dreaded having social interaction but because I had just discovered I could download classic PS1 games on it. I was enamored with the PS1 and wanted to play all of the system’s best games. So, on that trip, I decided to go through the original Silent Hill.
I barely made it ten minutes into the game before I put it down out of fear.
That was my introduction to the Silent Hill franchise. After hearing all about the then-most recent game in the series, Silent Hill: Homecoming, I wanted to dive headfirst into the series as my first M-rated franchise. I was a teenager at the time and thought I was ready to handle the mature themes and scares that the town of Silent Hill had to offer. And dear lord, I was wrong. Even in a crowded bus full of a bunch of theatre kids, I simply couldn’t handle the opening sequence of the game.
The original Silent Hill has a very non-traditional opening. After hearing an eerie mandolin serenade you into the town, you assume the role of Harry Mason as he begins to look for his missing daughter, Cheryl. At first, you find nothing, just snow and a shadowy figure in the distance running from you. As you follow this being, you’re taken into an alleyway that is getting darker and darker, the camera twisting in ways that are completely unnatural and disturbing. You eventually reach a crucified corpse as tiny little hellspawns appear around you and begin to attack you. You have no weapons. You have no escape. All you can do is die.
Afterward, you wake up in a diner, completely fine and unaware of how you got there. A police officer, Cybil Bennet, greets you and somewhat offers guidance on where you can go to find Cheryl. After she leaves, a monster breaks through the diner window, and with a weak little pistol, you have to frantically figure out how to kill it. No tutorial to offer assistance or even an explanation for what the radio static in the diner represents within the game. It’s kill or be killed, and I had no idea if this was meant to be scripted like the opening sequence or not.
It’s here that I put down the game and didn’t touch it for years. The thing that makes the first Silent Hill such a memorable experience, even after all these years, is how isolating it is. From the opening scene, there’s this initial sense that you’re completely alone. That quickly changes once you realize that monsters are wandering around, but even then, the wide open environment and the pervasive fog give you the impression that these monsters aren’t hunting you. They’re just watching you. You can’t see them, but they’re there, yet that feeling of being alone is still omnipresent. It’s this weird dichotomy to deal with, being both alone and watched, but it effectively creates this atmosphere that you are never safe.
Related: How Silent Hill: The Short Message Connects to Other Silent Hill Games
I never experienced a feeling quite like that before, so for years, I refused to play Silent Hill. I always stared at it in my PSP downloads throughout my high school career. Whenever I would download new games like Persona 3 Portable, God of Wars: Ghost of Sparta, or Half-Minute Hero, it would always be there, watching me like those creatures in the fog. It wasn’t until 2012, when Superstorm Sandy hit my home state of New Jersey, that I felt like I was ready to try the game again. It was around Halloween, my home had no power, and I had played my fair share of M-rated games by then, and being in a completely darkened home was the perfect time to conquer my fear. So, by charging my PSP frequently, thanks to my PSP car charging adapter, I was ready to go back into Silent Hill.
After beating that same intro again and making my way through the town, that foreboding atmosphere strangely shifted into something calmer. The silence of the town reminded me of my own town now, where there was no power and no one around to interact with. No social media, no physical get-togethers, nothing. It felt eerie but soothing. In the game, the exception to this was the confining environments like Midwich Elementary School or Alchemilla Hospital. These places were much more unnerving due to their narrow hallways and the threats within them, but I didn’t find them as scary. I suppose by that point, I expected an enemy would be on the other side of any door I entered, so I trained myself to have my weapon drawn and immediately attacked them once I came through the door. When I was able to anticipate the horror, it lost its impact.
But these locations also gave me some of the creepiest and coolest moments in the game. The fake-out jumpscare in Midwich Elementary was incredibly well done to the point where I don’t think anyone would be able to replicate it today. That, and the sudden appearance of an extra floor in Alchemila, made me pause the second I noticed it and filled me with a type of dread that’s hard to describe. Sure, the plot was nonsense, but I didn’t mind it since I was enjoying the mood the game depicted, made all the creepier by the total lack of light and power in the home I was playing it in.
I beat it a few days after Superstorm Sandy slammed into my town, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to replicate that experience. Lord knows I’ve tried with other Silent Hill games, but nothing really compared to that one time. Even to this day, fans of the original game will often vouch for it, saying that its atmosphere and the unique fear it channels is something special. It expertly utilized the limitations of the PS1 to its advantage to create a horror experience unlike any other. This is a horror game that could only work on 5th-generation hardware.
Since I played it back in 2012, I went back and got a physical version of the game. It wasn’t cheap – none of the Silent Hill games are anymore – but throughout college and even my adult life, I’ve been loaning that game out to others to try. I know the game like the back of my hand now, but I get a thrill looking at players experiencing this classic for the first time. Seeing that alleyway in the opening, the screeching of the radio, and all of the unique ways the game tries to scare you is thrilling for a newcomer. Even in the face of more technically proficient horror games, it’s still a powerful experience.
In 2022, I gave my girlfriend the original Silent Hill to play through, and she said that it was one of the creepiest games she had ever played. She also raged for hours against the moth boss to the point where she had to restart the entire game due to her having no healing items or ammo during that boss fight, but that’s beside the point. She still said that even when compared to the more recent games, something was offsetting about how the characters talked and how the world functioned. She said the game definitely gave off Twin Peaks vibes, which has been confirmed by Team Silent to be one of the main sources of inspiration for the series. From there, she’s gone on to play all of the other Team Silent games and still thinks the original has a certain aura to it that the other games just don’t capture.
And so here we are, 25 years later. I’ve immersed myself in the Silent Hill franchise, but I’ve also played many games inspired by it. Games like Tormented Souls, Signalis, and Alisa all use the original Silent Hill as a frame of reference, and all of the homages those games have are effective, but even then, they still can’t compare to the original game. Silent Hill lives rent-free in my mind after all of these years, and I’m pretty sure it’ll continue to do so easily. New games in the series may come out, and they may have their own unique identity, but they’ll still never compare to the first time I booted up the game on my PSP and couldn’t even make it five minutes into town. Its haunting atmosphere still manages to creep me out to this day.
