I’ve always had a soft spot for the Silent Hill series. I played the first game at an age when I absolutely shouldn’t have been playing it, and it left a pretty sizeable impression on me. I was there for Silent Hill 2 and 3, and I’ll happily defend Silent Hill 4: The Room until the day I die. Seriously, talk shit about that game and I’ll fight you. Same goes for Dark Souls II and Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I have chosen my hills, and I will fucking die on them.
Unfortunately, after 4, the series began taking a fairly spectacular nosedive and, despite Konami repeatedly trying to whip its corpse back into motion like Homer bludgeoning the Hamburglar while the children scream, “Stop! Stop! He’s already dead!”, it never really recovered. There have been flashes of potential, but the series gradually became a pale imitation of what made those original games so compelling. Which makes Silent Hill: Revelation particularly frustrating, because the ingredients for a decent adaptation are all sitting there waiting to be used.
The Silent Hill games were a masterclass in psychological and atmospheric horror. They could be grotesque and overtly horrifying, but the monsters were rarely frightening simply because they were big ugly bastards trying to kill you. They represented something. The games explored guilt, grief, punishment, abuse, repression and redemption, while deliberately leaving enough unanswered for the player to fill in the gaps themselves. It was thinking-man’s horror wrapped in a mainstream videogame coat, and when it worked, it trusted you to actually think about what you’d just experienced.
The 2006 Silent Hill film understood at least some of this. Despite being based primarily on the first game, it successfully captured the oppressive atmosphere, bizarre imagery and sense that Silent Hill itself was less a town than some sort of nightmarish punishment dimension. It wasn’t perfect, but it was one of the better videogame adaptations and, more importantly, it actually felt like Silent Hill.
Then came Silent Hill: Revelation. And whilst there are certainly worse videogame adaptations out there, there are few that demonstrate quite so clearly how to take everything interesting about a property and reduce it to a checklist of recognisable shit.
The film begins on a surprisingly strong note, plunging us straight into a nightmarish amusement park of non-Euclidean construction. Bizarre things wrapped in plastic hang from the stalls, Robbie the Rabbit makes an appearance and everything initially feels suitably strange. It’s recognisably Silent Hill, at least on an aesthetic level. Of course – as in Silent Hill 3’s intro – this is the prerequisite dream sequence, which is then revealed to be part of another dream sequence.
The references to the games, particularly 3, are plentiful and, to the film’s credit, often quite cleverly handled. Fans will recognise the monsters, locations and visual references without the movie constantly stopping to explain them, which is probably the best way to approach this sort of adaptation. Unfortunately, once the opening credits have rolled and we’re introduced to the actual story, Revelation starts struggling under the weight of its own mythology.
The film has the unenviable task of following the first movie while also adapting Silent Hill 3, meaning M. J. Bassett has to explain what happened previously, establish the new status quo and introduce the game’s mythology to people who may never have touched a controller. The result is a screenplay absolutely fucking drowning in exposition. Characters constantly explain things, introduce new factions and spell out backstory that would have been considerably more effective if we’d simply been allowed to wonder what the fuck was going on.
The film picks up several years after the events of the first movie. Sharon Da Silva (Adelaide Clemens), the little girl rescued from Silent Hill, is now living under the name Heather Mason with her adoptive father Christopher (Sean Bean) – now named Harry Mason, as he fucking should have been all along. The pair have spent years moving from town to town and changing their identities, constantly looking over their shoulders because Christopher knows that the Order, the fanatical religious cult from the first film, is still looking for his daughter. Heather doesn’t know the full story, but she does know she’s plagued by disturbing nightmares and visions of a strange amusement park, while the occasional glimpse of something considerably more unpleasant suggests Silent Hill hasn’t quite finished with her.
Naturally, this arrangement doesn’t last. On Heather’s eighteenth birthday, Christopher disappears, leaving behind a rather unsubtle warning that she should not go looking for him. Heather ignores this excellent advice and, after discovering that her father has been kidnapped, begins investigating his disappearance with the help of Vincent Cooper (Kit Harington), a schoolmate who follows her into the increasingly bizarre mess. Their investigation eventually leads them back to Silent Hill, because apparently there was nowhere else in America they could possibly have looked.
Once Heather crosses into the town, Revelation settles into its adaptation of Silent Hill 3. The town is being consumed by the familiar fog and darkness, while Heather is stalked by the Missionary, a grotesque creature who looks considerably more intimidating than most of the things actually going on around her. She discovers that Christopher has been taken by Claudia Wolf (Carrie-Anne Moss), the new leader of the Order, who wants to use Heather in a ritual involving the cult’s version of God. This requires Heather to willingly return to Silent Hill, which is why Christopher is being kept alive as bait rather than simply being murdered, despite the cult apparently having no shortage of opportunities to do so.
Heather also encounters Leonard Wolf (Malcolm McDowell), Claudia’s father, and various other unfortunate residents trapped in the town. There’s a trip through an abandoned amusement park, a rather unpleasant sequence involving a mannequin creature, Pyramid Head wandering around murdering people who appear to have wandered into the wrong film, and eventually the increasingly convoluted revelation that Heather is essentially the battleground for a conflict between different factions of the Order. There’s even a lengthy detour involving Vincent’s family and the revelation that he isn’t quite the innocent outsider he initially appears to be.
Eventually everything converges on the cult’s attempt to bring about the birth of their version of God, Heather is forced into the usual Silent Hill nightmare logic of confronting both the monsters and the people responsible for her suffering, and the film eventually delivers the inevitable Pyramid Head showdown. It’s all perfectly serviceable as a sequence of events, but the problem is that Revelation spends so much time explaining the mythology that very little of it actually feels mysterious.
The problem is that none of this feels particularly frightening. And that brings me back to the biggest problem with Revelation: bastardisation. There is an annoying tendency in horror franchises for the things that made them distinctive to be gradually stripped down until all you’re left with is the iconography. You start with something frightening, then somebody notices that audiences really like the scary monster, so the monster gets more screen time. Then it needs a bigger role. Then it needs a fight scene. Then someone decides it would be cool if the monster fought another monster.
And suddenly Pyramid Head is having a fucking sword fight. I genuinely struggle to look at Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2 now without remembering that at some point he became a fucking Monster Brawl character. In the game, Pyramid Head is an embodiment of James Sunderland’s guilt and desire for punishment. He isn’t scary because he’s carrying a giant knife; he’s scary because of what he represents. In Revelation, he’s essentially a recognisable franchise mascot who occasionally turns up to chop some mooks apart. The same problem affects the Nurses. They’re iconic because of the strange sexualised body horror of their designs and their connection to the game’s themes, yet here they largely exist as recognisable Silent Hill creatures that the audience can point at and go, “Oh, it’s the Nurses!” It’s the horror equivalent of putting a Funko Pop in the background and expecting applause.
The film’s early amusement park sequence actually demonstrates what Revelation could have been. It’s strange, disorientating and visually imaginative, and for a few minutes I was genuinely hopeful. Unfortunately, the film soon settles into a much more conventional monster movie, throwing creatures at Heather whenever the plot needs something to happen.
The mall sequence is perhaps the worst offender. Rather than drawing from the series’ rich tradition of psychological horror and disturbing body imagery, Bassett gives us zombie children in party hats and a grotesque butcher wandering around a kitchen. There’s nothing particularly wrong with either idea in isolation, but neither feels especially connected to the specific flavour of horror that made Silent Hill interesting in the first place.
And then there’s the fucking camera. An out-of-focus, wobbly camera does not make a scene appear hazy and disorientating. It makes it look like you filmed the bastard across the road while hiding behind a bush. The aesthetics are similarly inconsistent. The original film had a genuinely oppressive atmosphere: the fog, the ash, the rust, the darkness and the transformation between the ordinary town and its nightmarish counterpart all contributed to a sense of isolation. Revelation has some decent production design, but it feels much more like a generic horror theme park. Even Silent Hill itself doesn’t feel particularly isolated because Heather spends half the fucking film bumping into other people.
Isolation is one of horror’s greatest weapons. It removes the false reassurance that comes with safety in numbers. Yet Heather arrives in Silent Hill and immediately starts meeting people, cultists, monsters and other unfortunate souls. At one point she encounters two survivors from a lost tourist group, and all I could think was: “There goes the neighbourhood.”
The acting doesn’t help. There is actually a reasonably impressive cast here, but it’s as though everyone collectively decided to phone it in. Sean Bean is capable of considerably better than this, although I’m willing to blame at least some of his performance on the fact that he has to maintain that accent. Adelaide Clemens is probably the strongest of the bunch and does a decent job carrying the film, while Malcolm McDowell…well, he’s having considerably more fun than everyone else. Carrie-Anne Moss and Deborah Kara Unger are perfectly respectable given the material, but there isn’t much anyone can do when the screenplay gives them exposition instead of characters. Kit Harington, meanwhile, is handsome, British and largely pointless, which is probably a pretty accurate description of his role in the grand scheme of things.
The creatures themselves are a mixed bag. Some of the practical effects are decent, and the film does occasionally produce an interesting visual, but there’s very little sense that these things have any meaning beyond “the videogame had monsters, so we’d better put the monsters in.” Pyramid Head is here. The Nurses are here. Robbie the Rabbit is here. The Missionary is here. I did like that mannequin-spider thing made up of all the limbs. It’s fucked up in all the best ways and, at least, captured the spirit of what Silent Hill is; even if the actually execution looked like a PS2 game in the worst way possible.
And that’s what ultimately makes Silent Hill: Revelation so frustrating. It isn’t that the filmmakers didn’t have enough material to work with; they had one of the richest horror videogame universes ever created. They just seemed more interested in reproducing its surface than understanding what was underneath it. Which brings me back to Return to Silent Hill, which is now due in 2026.
I’m cautiously optimistic. The fact that Christophe Gans is returning to direct is encouraging, and the decision to adapt Silent Hill 2 gives the new film perhaps the strongest possible foundation. That game doesn’t need an endless parade of monsters or an explanation for every fucking thing. It needs atmosphere, ambiguity and psychological horror. It needs to make you uncomfortable without necessarily telling you why.
Most importantly, it needs to remember that Pyramid Head doesn’t need to fight anybody. Please, for the love of God, don’t make Pyramid Head fight anybody. As for Revelation, though, it’s a film that looks like Silent Hill, sounds like Silent Hill and contains a frankly impressive amount of Silent Hill shit, but rarely captures what actually made Silent Hill scary. And if Return to Silent Hill can remember that, I’ll happily take another trip into the fog.
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