For two decades, as a non-gamer, I have believed that Christophe Gans’s SILENT HILL is the best video game movie. I have a friend who likes the games and thinks it’s a good adaptation, but that was never a factor for me. I just thought that whatever they were doing as far as translation really worked to create a unique horror movie with a strong atmosphere, bizarre creature designs, excellent FX work and an admirable preference for dream logic over boring reality. Even the characters’ numerous illogical choices and what I deemed to be “terrible” dialogue according to my Ain’t It Cool News review at the time added to the surreal feeling, and reminded me of the dubbed Italian horror movies I enjoyed.

It really felt different from the mainstream horror movies of the time, which made me like it, but also helped make it unpopular. I remember seeing it at a preview screening with most of the crowd in open, loud revolt from early on. I went with my now wife and another couple, who were talking about how terrible it was as we left. When I admitted I liked it they all looked at me like I was insane.

One thing I love about it is this great technique of having a cold open that seems like a dream sequence, so when you realize it’s not, it’s the baseline reality we’re starting with, that’s very unsettling. Rose (Radha Mitchell, PITCH BLACK) is running through the woods at night screaming for her adopted daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland, CARRIE 2002), who has sleepwalked to the edge of a cliff by a waterfall. There’s a freeway and a light-up cross sign nearby and when she looks down she imagines a labyrinthian wooden warren like where Scorpion lived in the first MORTAL KOMBAT movie. (I guess all video game movies need one of those.)

Rose and her husband Christopher (Sean Bean, RONIN) stop the kid from plummeting to her death, but Rose has had enough. Sharon keeps having dreams about this town Silent Hill – like Boone and Midian – so Rose decides to bring her there to see if it helps her remember anything.

In retrospect an extra layer of oddness comes from the fact that it was originally written with no male characters. A producer objected, so Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary added the dad character, but they didn’t really rework things, they just gave him a subplot so separate from Rose’s story that it could’ve been done in reshoots. Even in this opening scene they’re running after Sharon separately, and the next day Rose and Sharon leave for Silent Hill without telling him. He only figures it out by checking her Google search history! Then he spends the whole movie trying to find them.

Another bizarre turn only 12 minutes in is when motorcycle cop Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden, FANTASTIC FOUR 2005) for some reason thinks they’re suspicious and pulls them over but Rose decides to floor it and crash through a fence into Silent Hill. (It’s a closed off ghost town but has its own exit with prominent signage.) Then they experience the ol’ somebody-walks-out-into-the-road-so-they-swerve-and-crash followed by a waking-up-from-unconsciousness-and-everything-is-weird-so-they-might-actually-be-dead. Sharon is gone so Rose wanders the empty town catching glimpses and chasing her like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

It’s foggy and it appears to be snowing, but it turns out to be ash. Rose moves between this eerie dreamscape and the dark corridors below the town, sort of an underground Seattle feel with rust and char and other weathered surfaces illuminated by her lighter. I read that the light scenes are shot on Super 35 but the underground scenes are digital in order to capture the darkness, and the lighting is really good even though I was watching it on a DVD that Gans has complained was improperly compressed. It’s a great looking movie.

The first monster encounter is 20 minutes in, and it’s a banger. I don’t even know how to describe it. Weird screaming stretchy melty guy and then a bunch of burnt babies are crawling after her. She’s underground and it’s dark but you just see enough. They have embers inside them and turn to floating ash. Then she wakes up up above but if you’re telling me that was a dream and this is not… I don’t know. Thirty seconds later she finds a street that ends in a huge chasm and a BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR lookin lady named Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger, HIGHLANDER III) is talking to her about “the Dark One” and they’re fighting over Rose’s locket of Sharon because she looks exactly like that lady’s dead daughter Alessa.

Anyway, that motorcycle cop Cybil followed her into Silent Hill (or death), and she handcuffs her. ACAB. They find that radios, phones and walkie talkies don’t work, but they don’t think much of it. Meanwhile, Christopher shows up to where police are investigating Rose’s crashed vehicle, but everything looks different – it’s rainy, not ashy. Officer Thomas Gucci (Kim Coates, THE CLIENT) drives Christopher into town and helps him look for Rose and Sharon. Having grown up there, he explains some of the history and that there’s still a coal fire burning underground.

That all of the leads look like models adds to the unreality of it, I think. I don’t think there are any women in this that would blend in a crowd. One thing that’s funny and video gamey is how long Cybil wears her sunglasses and helmet, looking like the T-1000. At minute 31 she finally takes the shades off, but only ditches the helmet when an armless blob man (dancer Michael Cota) projectile bleeds acid onto her head. So there’s a big reveal that she has fashionable hair.

Every once in a while an alarm sounds and the walls drip like blood and turn rotten and weird Cenobite bastards crawl out of the dark and there’s a part with swarms of giant roaches that have human faces. These are the parts where the movie is really cooking. In 2026 Pyramid Head (Roberto Campanella, also the choreographer and movement coordinator) is a well known image, but man, at that screening when a huge veiny muscle guy with a metal triangle for a head started stabbing a giant knife through the vault door it was unlike anything I’d seen. He was like a surrealist Leatherface. And then there’s the part where he walks toward them carrying a woman with one hand, tears off her dress with one yank, then does the same to her skin, then tosses her against the church doors like a wet rag. The guy made an impression that really stuck with me.

Having spent 20 years building this up as a great movie in my mind, I have to admit that this viewing was a little disappointing. I still loved the same things – the look, the atmosphere, the creatures, the whole feel – but was less forgiving of the narrative and pacing. The climax being a crowd of religious zealots in a church yelling and threatening to burn women at the stake feels too generic (until the death-by-flying-barbwire part). It’s way better when it’s an instinctual, illogical experience than when it’s asking you to think about a mystery and a timeline and what the different monsters represent about the history of the town. I don’t have much interest in the convoluted backstory about Alessa and high priestess Christabella (Alice Krige, SLEEPWALKERS), and the more bits of information offered about it the less I care to piece it together.

But that’s a video game format, I think. That’s probly what some people like about it. And there are other video game touches I wouldn’t know how to appreciate, like I read that they prepared special cranes to make the camera move like the virtual camera in the game.Or that the music by Akira Yamaoka (KUSO) and Jeff Danna (THE BOONDOCK SAINTS) comes from the games.

I’m not usually a runtime cop but I do now think this might work better if it was shorter. I was wondering while watching it if it would be improved by (against the wishes of that producer) removing Sean Bean’s scenes entirely. Part of me thinks it would work better to just be completely submerged in the nightmare of Silent Hill. But I also recognize that having little breaks to catch your breath and contrast with “the real world” before plunging back in might be important. Or not. I’m not sure. I will say that I really like the ending, where they both return home but don’t see each other because they’re in two different realities. So that arguably makes it worth it.

Gans was coming off of the international cult hit BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF, so he was kinda hot shit, and he’d been wanting to adapt the game for several years, to the confusion of some of his collaborators. He made a 37 minute pitch video with Japanese subtitles to win over the Konami board of directors, who recognized that he cared about shit none of the other studios seeking the rights did.

Avary (KILLING ZOE, THE RULES OF ATTRACTION) had done rewrites on Gans’s first film, CRYING FREEMAN. He reportedly wanted to do his own interpretation of the spirit of the games, while Gans tried to stay faithful to them. Though not credited, Gans provided a treatment he’d written with Nicolas Boukhrief (writer/director of CASH TRUCK, that movie Guy Ritchie remade as WRATH OF MAN!).

He had some top level craftspeople in his crew. Check this shit out: cinematographer Dan Laustsen shot NIGHTWATCH (both versions) and MIMIC before BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF. He’d later reunite with Guillermo del Toro for CRIMSON PEAK, THE SHAPE OF WATER, NIGHTMARE ALLEY and FRANKENSTEIN, as well as shoot JOHN WICKs 2, 3, and 4. Production designer Carol Spier had also done some del Toro movies (MIMIC, BLADE II) but more famously had worked with David Cronenberg since THE DEAD ZONE. Creature designer/supervisor Patrick Tatopoulos had already been production designer of DARK CITY (so I forgive him for designing the Emmerich Godzilla). Editor Sébastien Prangère would later cut MARTYRS. And this is weird but there’s an additional editor credit for David Wu, who cut numerous Hong Kong cinema classics including A BETTER TOMORROW, A CHINESE GHOST STORY, HARD BOILED and RED CLIFF, and plus directed THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR 2 after editing the first one. I guess it’s because Gans brought him on to do the Hong-Kong-inspired CRYING FREEMAN and BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF.

I felt so validated when Scream Factory made a special edition in 2019. Ha ha, suckers, it’s in the canon now. Whatever you think of the movie, I think it’s undeniable now that Gans was ahead of his time. All these years later video games are less niche, video game movies are less disreputable, more importantly there are generations raised on these types of games, who are more open to movies that lean heavier on vibes (and puzzles) than on storytelling, and who are accustomed to this aesthetic. I’m glad I didn’t have that last one because it was so great to experience this movie as something crazy and unheard of.

I’m not sure it’s the best video game movie anymore. This year’s RESIDENT EVIL definitely works way better as a whole, and I got such a kick out of some of the older, dumber RESIDENT EVILs, they might have more rewatch value for me than this does. Also I haven’t seen Agnès Varda’s KUNG FU MASTER yet. Is SILENT HILL the most unique and most visually accomplished though? I think so. It’s not perfect, but it’s special.

Somehow Gans has only done two movies since – BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (2014) and this year’s RETURN TO SILENT HILL. The bad things I’ve heard about the two sequels have kept me away, but I probly have a duty to find out for myself.