First, a caveat: the only Silent Hill game I've played is the recent remake of Silent Hill 2. It was fantastic (and I think while there are some people who will never agree that a remake is better than the original, it seems that a lot of fans of the 2001 version felt that Blooberteam did a great job with it).
SH2 is, of course, the game in the series that permeated pop culture the most, particularly with the iconic Pyramid Head (technically known in the game files as "Red Pyramid Thing," I think because James refers to him as that when he meets Angela in the Blue Creek Apartments - that's the second apartment building, right?)
Again, I haven't played the other games, but I've seen various overviews of them, including listening to the Lore Dump podcast going over it last year (what inspired this post was their Halloween follow-up this year covering the second game, and I assume they'll do 3 next year).
Given that so many people were first exposed to the franchise with the second game, there are some assumptions that they (meaning I) made.
In Silent Hill 2, most of what is going on, including the monsters that James Sunderland faces, are related to his own subconscious issues.
Uh, spoilers for a 25-year-old game, I guess. I'm not going to do a break. This was, like, the main thing I knew about the game going into it. Also, spoilers for the film Jacob's Ladder.
James Sunderland is not a well man. He has suffered a psychotic break, forgetting the terrible crime he has committed and rewriting a narrative that makes him innocent. He says his wife, Mary, has been dead for three years, but it is instead three years since Mary was diagnosed with a terminal disease (unspecified, but probably some kind of cancer). Nearing the end, she was released from the hospital to have one last chance to go home, and while the motives are open to interpretation (and probably multifaceted,) James killed her, smothering her with a pillow.
It is my interpretation, and one I imagine is not unique to me, that the very first moment of the game, when we see James staring at himself in the mirror of a dingy public bathroom and do this strange hand gesture as if to confirm for himself that what he is looking at is him, is probably the moment that the false narrative took hold in his mind.
While I believe it was only speculated on with the original game, the remake makes it fairly explicit that Mary's body is in the back of his car. And the In Water ending, in which James drives his car into Toluca Lake to drown himself, might be his attempt to reunite with her in death.
Now, I don't think anyone's interpretation of Silent Hill 2 is that none of what happens is "real," and that it's all purely within James' head, like a big hallucination before he drives into the lake. For one thing, that's not the only ending of the game (I got the "Leave" ending, which is probably the happiest, though I don't know that mentally ill wife-murderer James Sunderland is the best choice to act as guardian for an 8-year-old child he just met. Maybe instead he'll just get her out of the town and find a more appropriate home for her. Who knows?) But on top of the multiple endings, there's also the existence of Eddie and Angela. I think Laura is probably a real person, while Maria is not (though, cruelly, she's probably sentient even though she's a weird manifestation). But I fully believe that Eddie and Angela are both real people who are honestly on their own journeys based on the darkness in their own lives, and while their paths intersect with James (quite catastrophically for Eddie, though that's not really James' fault) it seems that they're going through their own hellish torments here - indeed, they kind of mirror one another, with Eddie existing in this frigid, freezer-like otherworld and Angela in a world that is always hot and on fire.
The point is that it seems that this place is truly special (not in a fun way) and is creating this metaphor-rich reality based on the individuals who are drawn there to torment them (and possibly give them the opportunity to process everything?)
The film Jacob's Ladder was a major influence on the game. In it, the main character is tormented by horrifying demons, but when he discovers what is actually happening: that he is dying, it becomes clear that the demons are actually benevolent figures who are trying to help him let go of the living world and move on. The film implies that this truly is a benevolent process, given that it ends with embracing his son, who died years ago.
So, is Silent Hill actually some kind of purgatory? A place for James to process and recognize the act that broke his sense of self? To confront the truth of what he did, and accept what that makes him?
No.
Because there's an evil cult there.
While I think within the world of the game, you could view the town in this metaphorical lens, and while there's a "real"-ness to what is encountered there, it also certainly exists in this profoundly subjective manner. While James does get a glimpse of Eddie's and Angela's respective Otherworlds, it's pretty clear that in numerous interactions with them, they must be seeing different realities. When James and Angela speak in Blue Creek Apartments, is the room on fire for her? As she stares into the reflection of the knife, are there flickering flames?
(Here, I think there might be some discrepancy between the remake and original - I think both apartments in the original might have been in the "real" "Fog World" in the original, while the remake gives us our first explicit glimpse of the Otherworld in Blue Creek. Though that distinction kind of breaks down in the latter half of the game.)
The point, though, is that even if there are sort of "mechanics" of what is going on in Silent Hill in the second game, there's no explanation of what is actually causing all of it. The story focuses entirely on the psychological aspects of things, the plot being entirely about James and his strange interactions with this bizarre doppelganger of his dead wife (a reasonable interpretation of Maria as embodying the version of Mary he felt was robbed from him when she got sick. The deeper you go, the more there is to unpack about latent misogyny - something that every man has internalized in a patriarchal culture and has to kind of dig out to confront. Most of us don't allow this misogyny to manifest in violence toward the women in our lives, but a shockingly large number of us do, so... yeah. If only James had processed this before murdering Mary. But then we wouldn't have this story. At least in this case, the characters are fictional) and monsters that represent aspects of his psychological issues.
But in the first game, Harry Mason is not, as far as I can tell, actually burdened with any terrible psychological guilt or trauma. The monsters are not manifestations of anything happening with his psyche, but are instead born from a person with weird magical powers. There's a cult trying to summon some kind of evil demon god.
Again - I have not played this game. I think that, even if it does have these tropey elements, it's still a more surreal and psychological horror game than, say, Resident Evil (which it was made as a kind of response to - Konami trying to get their own survival horror franchise to compete with Capcom). The sort of questionable reality, and multiple layers of reality, and the lacing of tragedy throughout it, was already present with the first game.
But there's a bit more of an explanation to things, with clear villains and heroes.
Who is the villain in Silent Hill 2? Is it James himself? Is it Maria? Is it Pyramid Head? I don't think that it really works that way.
(Hey, random thought: has anyone done an analysis of the story as it relates to the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice? After all, James "looking at" Maria and recognizing her as something other than his wife means that he does not get to leave with her. In the myth, it's tragic that Orpheus' spark of doubt at the last moment dooms Eurydice to remain in Hades. Ironically, the one ending where James does get to leave with "his wife" is probably the darkest - the "Maria" ending where it feels implied that he might wind up murdering her too.)
Anyway, I know that some fans of the franchise feel really disappointed that, as the series went on, the cult stuff got sort of abandoned, with more of a focus on pure psychological horror, and that even if it's the best game in the series, Silent Hill 2 kind of "ruined" the franchise.
I can't speak to that (maybe ironic given that I'm writing this whole post about it) because of my limited experience with the series. My understanding of the plots of the first three games is that 3 is more of a direct sequel to the first.
But also... I really have to wonder, and maybe ask: is all the cult stuff actually good?
I guess having grown up in the 90s, when the Satanic Panic was starting to run out of steam, the idea of devil-worshipping cults just does not scare me all that much (I get that the cult in Silent Hill isn't' strictly a satanic cult, but the monster they summon as the final boss of the first game is classically demonic in form). Indeed, the religious right pushed this narrative of satanism everywhere so hard that it just became laughable. (Perhaps the last gasps of it were the condemnation of the Harry Potter books when I was in high school in the early 2000s, which felt utterly ridiculous. Of course, the problem now is that the author of said books is a rabid transphobe, which sucks, because while it was never, like, the core to my nerdy identity, I enjoyed those books when I first read them.)
I imagine that if you grew up super (by which I mean sort of fundamentalist/conservative) Christian, maybe you have a more deeply-instilled fear of the satanic. But, again, as a franchise newcomer, I'm really curious (and partially skeptical) about how those integrate into the tone.
Obviously, the cult stuff came first, so it's not something that was thrown in out of the blue to an existing psychological horror franchise, and there I can see where the indignation about this comes from the old-school fans.
I do believe that Blooberteam, having proven themselves with the remake of 2, are working on a remake of the first game, and I'll be eager to see it. I know that games 1-3 (maybe 1-4?) in the Silent Hill series are deeply loved by the fans (though I think that's partially in contrast with the later games).
And to be fair: I think that Twin Peaks was one of the influences on the first game, and while much of what I love about that show is how it feels like a whole dream-mythos cooked up in David Lynch's brain, the truth is that there is a lot of real-world myth and philosophy that is integrated into its own mythos, just that a lot of it is concepts that I'm less familiar with given my cultural background. I truly thought that "tulpa" was a term that was invented for the show in its much-later third season, only to discover that, nope, that's something from Tibetan Buddhism. I had grouped it with Garmonbozia, which I'm pretty confident is a pure Lynch invention.
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