Terror and Topology in Silent Hill
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
There are villains in Silent Hill, but there is no villain. There are monsters in Silent Hill, shuffling, swooping, tackling, stinging, stabbing, swallowing. There is thick fog and snow falling out of season, alternating with a deep darkness that surrounds rusting industrial grates and fences. All of this is Silent Hill. It seems knowable and recognizable in the fog, though the calm of the town is often interrupted by a whining radio that heralds the approach of pterodactyl-like avian horrors and skinless dogs. But there is more than one Silent Hill, and the Otherworld glides uncomfortably through the already distressingly wrong Fog World. These worlds together make up the Silent Hill that players experience, and the uncanny transitions between them supply more terror than any of the town’s cultists or monsters.
In the first Silent Hill, published in 1999, the town’s mysteries were obscure. New players are unlikely to notice the first time the game’s protagonist, Harry Mason, slips into the Otherworld. There’s a car accident in the prologue to the game, after which Harry loses track of his daughter Cheryl. He follows her into the fog that permeates Silent Hill, the New England resort town that they were headed to for a vacation. In-game, within the dense fog, Cheryl appears ghostlike, running just out of view into an alley. Players control Harry, following Cheryl past a row of garages and into a narrow alley. There’s a portentous splash of blood on the wall, though Harry doesn’t seem to immediately take it as such. As he winds deeper into the alley, the camera shifts, panning from above, twisting the scene. After passing through another twist into the narrowing alley, Harry is assaulted by small, child-sized nightmare beings and blacks out.
Between the first moments of the game and when Harry next wakes up in a nearby cafe, unintended and involuntary movements between spaces recur. Silent Hill may at first seem to offer players of classic survival horror a little more openness and freedom than in preceding games of the genre. It mixes relatively open exploration on wide streets with constrained, fixed perspective alleys, corridors, and rooms. Running is almost always a player’s best option, and depending on where a character is within the town, there might be plenty of room for Harry to pound the pavement. Those options are, however, minimal at best, and they’re often revealed as illusory. The streets of Silent Hill are riddled with sinkholes that prevent easy navigation. Hidden keys mandate which doors can be unlocked and which places the player can enter. As the narrative progresses, Harry is thrown between worlds and spaces. This often happens with a single step over a bridge, through a door, or into a hole through a wall. The player can advance the story, but they can’t always choose where to go next. When space and place seem to conspire, twisting back on themselves, how can you plan your next move? The means of escape aren’t obvious when you’re fighting against topology.
Aside from the town’s streets and alleys, one of the first major locations in Silent Hill is its school. It features the first moment of somewhat purposeful movement between the Fog World and Otherworld, triggered as Harry moves through a tunnel underneath the school’s clock tower. When he emerges, he’s still in a school, but it’s become a place of rusting metal and clanging machinery. The surrounding darkness is now an opaque black. Even the floors aren’t solid but consist of a chain-link texture that rings as Harry’s feet run over it. Bodies hang from walls and fall from lockers.
All of that is menacing enough. Even so, this school of the Otherworld retains some familiarity. But the most disorienting transition in the school isn’t the monstrosity crouching in the space beyond the boiler room. It’s in a relatively benign movement between spaces. On the first floor of the school, there are two restrooms, marked with the usual symbols for boy and girl. Entering the boy’s room, players may open a stall to see a dramatically hung body, with chains appearing to cinch and nearly bisect it at the waist. There’s a shotgun on the floor, useful in a practical sense as they usually are in videogames. When players go into the girl’s restroom, there’s no such shocking surprise.
Except that the black loading screen takes a few more seconds than it does for the rest of the floor. And, if the player opens the map, it says they’re in the room on the second floor, not the first. All players need to do to return to the first floor is leave, enter, and leave again. The whole sequence is small, optional, and understated. Harry doesn’t comment on it, and there’s no threatening creature, no possibility of attack or death. There is simply this: in Silent Hill, space isn’t trustworthy. You can have a map of the building as it exists in a more recognizable reality, but there are places in between through which a person can slip.
Silent Hill repeats and elaborates on this theme. When Harry encounters the town’s hospital, it is nearly empty. It lacks even the minor enemies of the Fog World version of the school. As Harry repeats patterns from that school - checking rooms, going to the basement, turning on the power - he does so unhindered. The repetition builds dread, but there’s no assault, no explosion, no catharsis. Instead, power to elevators simply gets restored.
Once power is restored, it seems there’s nowhere to go. Harry can take the elevator back to the first floor, second, or third, but the doors on the upper floors are locked. Trying them out and returning to the elevator results in the mysterious and unquestioned appearance of a button to the fourth floor. The doors slide open on that deathly number (at least for those within tetraphobic cultures) and bring Harry into a horrific hospital of rust, blood, and murderous decay.
After that, Harry slips in and out of the Otherworld with increasing frequency. Some areas of the town, like the pier leading to the lighthouse and the amusement park, are never encountered in their Fog World forms. Sometimes, defeating a boss opens a path as it blows a hole through a wall, and other times defeating a boss will shift the town back to its Fog World incarnation. Eventually, through repetition, all roads lead back to the hospital. Or, at least, they lead back to somewhere that uses the signs and shapes of the hospital as its main architectural form.
The last area of Silent Hill is the culmination of its slippages between worlds. After once again blacking out, Harry appears to wake up back in the hospital. Players can again find the stairs that lead to the basement, but the door at the bottom of those stairs doesn’t bring players to that floor of the hospital. Instead, walking through that door moves Harry to one of the school’s classrooms, a single desk placed in its middle. There’s no map, but if the player tries to bring it up, it reads the place as “Nowhere.”
Nowhere is a collection of previous spaces and places. There’s the aforementioned classroom, the jewelry shop from the town center, the antique shop, the morgue and kitchen from the hospital. Each of these can be found behind a door in hallways resembling the Otherworld version of the hospital. The topology is warped: as players unlock doors in Nowhere, they may find that some move Harry between floors, just like the ones they encountered previously in the school. Having descended so far into the nightmare, it’s as though it contracts. Silent Hill has no more time to pretend to be a town, no more space to build its illusions. The sequence of doors to unlock and esoteric symbols to collect require Harry to take on a spider’s movements, darting between doors and floors, spinning overlapping threads in and out of the significant locations of his journey.
Sure, there’s also a cult that blends demonic sigils and symbols of Western religions, attempting to birth Samael and with him, the dead. The revealed plot is the story of a spiritually powerful dreamer named Alessa Gillespie, who split half of her soul into the being that is embodied by Cheryl Mason. Canonically, the Fog World and Otherworld spring from Alessa’s tortured mind as she attempts to prevent the cult from carrying out their plot. But it’s not as though Alessa is wholly in control - instead, the world that springs from her mind is filled with her traumas and phobias. Alessa’s past, Silent Hill’s present, the cultists who ritually and medically bound her, and the doctor and nurse who kept her body alive: these are all combined, mixed up, and thrown together. It’s not so much Alessa-the-person who moves the players around, but the place of Silent Hill itself. It throws up barriers, twisting metal, dropping roads into sinkholes, splashing blood and barbed wire where it will. Monsters can be dealt with through traditional videogame means of bullets and key items. But what can you do when the ineffable twists the bones and guts of a town? Even in the best possible ending, all you can hope for is escape.
