Silent Hill 2: The Geography of Fear

[The following essay contains MINOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

Bloober Team’s recent remake of Konami’s Silent Hill 2 begins in a dingy rest stop bathroom—the most terrifying setting imaginable.

As the introductory cutscene unfolds, the controllable protagonist, James Sunderland, steps out onto a scenic overlook, gazing broodingly at the vast expanse of woodland below. After providing the necessary narrative context via expository voiceover (I’ll refrain from describing the story in excessive detail here; the game’s richly complex themes and psychosexual subtext have already been thoroughly dissected elsewhere, by more qualified writers than myself), our hero sets off for his destination: the titular town of Silent Hill.

Unfortunately, a quick glance towards the tunnel ahead confirms that the most direct route is inaccessible—blocked by debris. Undeterred, James (now responding to your input) abandons his vehicle and continues on foot, following a steep, winding hiking trail downhill. The detour eventually leads to a small, isolated graveyard. It’s an… odd environmental detail, considering the surrounding landscape: the remote location is undoubtedly inconvenient for visiting mourners, while the decidedly swampy terrain seems impractical for the purpose of interring corpses. But there’s little time to contemplate the dissonance; you’ve got places to be.

Venturing onward along a muddy dirt road, you pass a sprawling ranch. Neglected equipment clutters the fields beyond the impassible fence. You might reasonably expect to glimpse employees going about their business, or at least some livestock grazing in the distance, but no—the lone living soul you’ll be encountering for a while was, ironically enough, back at the cemetery, and her cagey, aloof attitude didn’t exactly alleviate the suffocating solitude.

You soon discover that your progress is once again impeded, this time by a locked door inexplicably situated in the literal middle of nowhere. Helpful signage indicates that the key is, for reasons I can only attribute to dream logic, in the possession of the local auto mechanic. Luckily, his garage is nearby. Finding the front entrance shuttered and barred (of course), you loop around to the rear of the building and sneak in through a shattered window. The interior of the establishment is dark, dreary, foreboding. A lonely bulb illuminates the manager’s desk—which, according to the conventions of level design, designates it as your objective. Slowly, cautiously, you creep forward, the ominous creak and groan of rusted metal taunting your every step. You slide open the drawer and extract your prize—whereupon you are attacked by…

…nothing. At this early stage, there are no enemies, no monsters, no lurking abominations. Still, the lack of an immediate threat hardly diminishes the deliciously suspenseful atmosphere. Even before anything explicitly supernatural occurs, the mood is pervasively eerie, uncanny, unsettling. The incomprehensibly convoluted journey that brings you to the equally labyrinthine streets of Silent Hill proper instills a sense of unease, of anxiety, of just plain wrongness, as though the fabric of reality itself is unraveling, stranding you on the outskirts of a civilization that you can never quite reach.

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore…”

The effect is covert, subconscious, almost subliminal: traversing such fundamentally unnatural, abnormal, distorted geography disrupts your equilibrium, throwing you off-balance—leaving you dazed, anxious, and vulnerable to the comparatively traditional scares that await on the other side of the relatively mundane prologue.

And that delightful subtlety is what makes Silent Hill 2 a horror masterpiece.