Enjoying the unique Silent Hill for the primary time again in 1999, a lot 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 simple 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 Group Silent’s groundbreaking horror title, extra so than any weird UFO or shiba inu-related secret ending within the franchise.
The largest reference is with Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary Faculty — which pulls its identify from Village of the Damned. It’s immediately based mostly on the varsity from Kindergarten Cop, because the beneath video completely illustrates. (Within the film, it’s known as Astoria Elementary, but it surely’s a real-world grade faculty named John Jacob Astor Elementary.)
The Silent Hill growth staff turned to Kindergarten Cop, launched in 1990, to present their sport an genuine small-town American really feel, from the yellow faculty busses to the posters that embellish 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 fact. Somebody on the staff simply actually likes Kindergarten Cop, a really unusual and tonally chaotic film, and wished to present 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 staff’s influences. The in-game map is full of 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 lecturers 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 contains 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. Nearly each sport 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 sport.
“I by no means favored the actually bloody shock-fest form of horror movie, so I used to be sort of at a loss once we began out,” Toyama mentioned. “What I’m a fan of is occult stuff and UFO tales and so forth; that and I had watched lots of David Lynch movies. So it was actually a matter of me taking what was on my cabinets and taking the extra horror-oriented facets of what I discovered. I actually didn’t suppose [Silent Hill] was that a lot of a horror sport, and it was sort of a shock to me when individuals instructed me it was scary after it got here out!”
Fortunately, for self-professed scaredy-cats like Toyama, that horror may be numbed considerably whenever you re-imagine Silent Hill as only a nightmare on the earth of Kindergarten Cop.