Spoiler Alert
If you have not seen Shutter Island and want to DO NOT READ
Most of my blogs on here are either to do with my progress as a games designer or to do with my news stories with ifmenhadwings. Its not often that I like to be overtly critical of something that I have seen unless I am actually reviewing it, yet after watching Shutter Island last night I feel an overwhelming desire to speak my mind.
The reason for this is quite simple, Shutter Isalnd is the closest thing I have ever seen to what I feel a Silent Hill movie should have been like. Now I’m not saying that Silent Hill the movie was a particularly bad movie, on the contrary I quite enjoyed watching the paper thin plot and fantastical scenery, yet it never really touched upon what makes the original Silent Hill games special. It’s also something that I feel has gotten lost in the many incarnations of the game on modern consoles such as the scandalous Silent Hill: Homecoming.
The thing that I speak of is madness.
Similar to Lovecraftian tales and Poe like horror Silent Hill 2 isn’t a game about a man who goes to a creepy and scary town with horrific creatures and monsters in it. It is a tale about a man who is trying to avoid his own madness by suppressing his own guilt, and through this the apparitions of monsters and the town come to be. Shutter Island offers a similar palette of story with our “hero” Teddy Daniels going to an island to investigate the disappearance of a murderess who killed her children by drowning them in a lake behind their house. A simple enough story to wet the appetite, but it isn’t before long we, as viewers, start to notice that things are not right and the madness starts to shine through. Walking dreams give us glimpses of horror that seems to tie our protagonist to this island in a more prominent way than just a Marshall on a case. In Silent Hill 2 this is done through the encounters that James Sunderland has such as Maria who is the spitting image of his late wife. These moments of surrealism use strangeness to lure the viewer or player out of their comfortable shell to give them a glimpse of the truth, never to little but never too much.
Depicting madness must be no easy feat as many of us have never been there and if we have usually not for very long. But these two tales share so much in terms depicting madness that they have both captivated audiences worldwide. Both protagonists are fighting for a cause that represses there own guilt and are only left in peace by their demons when they accept their actions as well as their fate. In both these cases realisation is the door to the truth for the viewer, which often leaves them shocked as they have become accustomed to their protagonist’s quest and goals. In Silent Hill 2 it is when we find out that James Sunderland killed his own wife and in Shutter Island it is when we find out that Teddy’s wife is the person who killed her children and that he killed her before going mad and becoming an inmate at the Island.
Both cases do not base themselves on cheap shocks or overly gory moments to produce that sense of dread. Silent Hill 2 in my opinion is the least distinctly horrific in terms of visual design in the series (apart from shattered memories perhaps) yet is quite easily the scariest. The same with Shutter Island, many a horror film I have watched of late and most are gory, slash fests that leave little or no indent in my life., yet Shutter Island frightened me.
At the end of the day, new developers of Silent Hill games do a great job of instilling horrific imagery and great graphics in the series, yet somehow miss the point that people are more afraid of madness and uncertainty than a bloody severed head. The same with the Silent Hill film, the look was there indeed, no one could deny that. Yet something was missing from the film entirely, the thing that made Silent Hill 2 shocking, powerful and sad.
...madness.
