Silent Hill

So out of the five we did, this one, and I'm just going to hit that again.

So if you guys have or haven't listened, we did Silent Hill, Stir of Echoes, Hereditary, The Descent, Lights Out.

Obviously, at this point, we'll have done Other Mommy, but we haven't seen it.

Coraline, yeah.

order

in order

I probably put fallen first yeah honestly probably hereditary lights out stir of Echoes I didn't watch Silent Hill, so I can't rate it.

And then I'd put The Descent at the bottom.

Well, funny you should say that.

It did actually, it was the inspiration behind the film version of Silent Hill.

Oh, was it? Yeah.

Which I've not seen.

No.

I mean, it's a six out of ten.

Have you seen the new Silent Hill? No, it's a new Resident Evil film.

There was both.

Looking closer, it's like a pyramid seen from above, squares getting smaller and tighter toward the middle, like something being pressed inward, compressed, which is what the world did to Little Death.

Fun aside for the gamers, it echoes Pyramid Head from Silent Hill.

I've never played it, but I see you.

The eyes are somewhere inside the box.

I don't know how good it was on the non-restored version, but I caught the restoration at the IFC Center, and the soundtrack is crazy.

It's clearly a really big influence on Silent Hill, especially the design of some of the creatures in that and the way they incorporate shapes and your pyramid heads and your abstract daddies or whatever.

clearly highly influential but like yeah there's I think there's something that just kind of doesn't really cross the finish line for me I don't know if it's just not terribly compelled by this sort of like abstract like creation myth that's just not really something that I'm like super into maybe I just need more structure or something to kind of like get me through that like the run time doesn't bother me And like, I mean, the visuals are good, but like, there's this, this wants something else from this.

And, um, it just doesn't feel like it's there for me.

us for an episode of our spooky mini-season.

We do this every October where we... cover horror and horror-ish movies sometimes a film so bad that it ends up scaring us sometimes not and this week we're talking about silent hill it was supposed to be the movie that finally broke the video game curse instead it became something much stranger a deeply divisive horror film that some people dismiss as nonsense, while others consider it one of the most atmospheric horror movies of the 2000s.

Director Christoph Ganz didn't try to make a normal Hollywood horror movie.

He made a full-blown nightmare.

Fog-filled streets, industrial hellscapes, grotesque monsters, and enough religious imagery to make the whole thing feel like a panic attack.

But beneath all the visuals, does the movie actually work? Is there a coherent story hiding underneath the ash and the rust? Or is this just two hours of creepy imagery stitched together by vibes alone? On this episode of Why Wasn't It Better, we head to Silent Hill, West Virginia, to talk about one of the most visually ambitious and most confusing video game adaptations ever made.

And joining us today is a very special guest.

It's our producer, Eric Taylor.

273.

Silent Hill! I've

never seen this.

Is this a video game? Oh, God, yes.

No, he didn't.

Are you sure? No, I'm not sure.

It's a movie about a video game, which has had so many different, like the Silent Hill and then Resident Evil and then all this bullshit.

You know how many Resident Evil films there are now? Too many.