Taking part in the unique Silent Hill for the primary time again in 1999, lots of its influences have been instantly obvious: Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror film Jacob’s Ladder and adaptation of Lolita; William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist 3; Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; the sci-fi and horror works of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman), and Dean Koontz.
It wasn’t till the next decade that hardcore Silent Hill followers uncovered the plain affect of Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy film Kindergarten Cop on the design and structure of the sport. Which may be the strangest revelation about Workforce Silent’s groundbreaking horror title, extra so than any weird UFO or shiba inu-related secret ending within the franchise.
The most important reference is with Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary Faculty — which pulls its identify from Village of the Damned. It’s immediately primarily based on the varsity from Kindergarten Cop, because the under video completely illustrates. (Within the film, it’s known as Astoria Elementary, however it’s a real-world grade college named John Jacob Astor Elementary.)
The Silent Hill improvement crew turned to Kindergarten Cop, launched in 1990, to offer their recreation an genuine small-town American really feel, from the yellow college busses to the posters that enhance the varsity hallways. Some argue the influences go deeper, like that Silent Hill’s protagonist Harry Mason is dressed equally sufficient to Schwarzenegger’s John Kimble. Each are tales about lacking kids, and each fortunately finish with the male lead turning into a brand new father determine.
I select to consider one other reality. Somebody on the crew simply actually likes Kindergarten Cop, a really unusual and tonally chaotic film, and wished to offer Reitman’s highest-rated Schwarzenegger automobile (above Junior and Twins) its due props.
Silent Hill is, in spite of everything, a love letter to the crew’s influences. The in-game map is crammed with streets named after style writers like James Ellroy, Carl Sagan, Robert Bloch, Michael Crichton, and Richard Matheson. In-game newspapers reference The Silence of the Lambs serial killer Buffalo Invoice. 4 academics at Midwich Elementary are named after the members of Sonic Youth. One of many city’s bridges is called after Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle fame. Even the unusual UFO endings now learn as homage.
Silent Hill author Hiroyuki Owaku would later carry these Lynchian influences into Silent Hill 2, which incorporates a scene ripped from Blue Velvet, with Pyramid Head standing in for Frank Sales space. Later video games would reference the Silent Hill video games themselves, with Silent Hill 3 looping again on Harry Mason’s story and Silent Hill 4: The Room, connecting again to minor characters in 2 and 3. Virtually each recreation within the franchise would additionally implement its personal model of the comedic UFO ending.
In a 2013 Famitsu interview, Silent Hill director Keiichiro Toyama talked about what influenced him in designing the unique recreation.
“I by no means appreciated the actually bloody shock-fest type of horror movie, so I used to be type of at a loss after we began out,” Toyama stated. “What I’m a fan of is occult stuff and UFO tales and so forth; that and I had watched numerous David Lynch movies. So it was actually a matter of me taking what was on my cabinets and taking the extra horror-oriented points of what I discovered. I actually didn’t assume [Silent Hill] was that a lot of a horror recreation, and it was type of a shock to me when folks instructed me it was scary after it got here out!”
Fortunately, for self-professed scaredy-cats like Toyama, that horror will be numbed considerably once you re-imagine Silent Hill as only a nightmare on this planet of Kindergarten Cop.
