Reflections of Fear
A Narrative Analysis of Silent Hill 2 (2001)
The following is an essay I wrote for my former gaming podcast, The Controller Report, back in 2017. I am republishing it here, as it was, in the interest of compiling a library of my writing.
Stephen King once wrote that the horror genre could be categorized in three levels. Revulsion, which is the cheapest of all scares. As he describes it, it's a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs or something green and slimy that splatters against your arm. Revulsion is followed by horror or the moment when the monster is finally revealed. In his own words, it's spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, the unnatural. Finally, we have the finest of frights: Terror. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you. You hear it. You feel its breath against your ear. But when you turn around, there's nothing there.
Terror is the most difficult of the three to elicit out of an audience. What terrifies one may not truly terrify the next. Inspiring true fear comes from forcing us to comprehend that which confuses us. One of the most universally terrifying traits that we as humans all share is a penchant for immediately fearing that which we cannot understand. It's a survival instinct that has allowed our species to progress to this point. However, despite successfully managing to escape the food chain, humans are still prone to being controlled by these baser fears. The fear of larger predators and mortal danger has, for the most part in civil society, been replaced by irrationality brought upon by higher sentience. I'd venture to say that the one thing most people irrationally fear with a true sense of terror is the same thing that most people simply cannot understand. Themselves. People will go to great lengths to avoid the feelings that are inspired by looking in the mirror for too long, which is exactly where we find ourselves at the start of Silent Hill 2.
From the opening shot, it becomes clear that Silent Hill 2 is a story about reflections. Channeled through our protagonist, James Sunderland. He's come back to Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his dead wife, beckoning him to return there and meet her in their special place. And what makes this place so special is its status as a reflection of James' psyche. Monstrous portrayals of his fears that are designed to be beaten and killed or simply run away from litter the streets of the titular town. This journey grows only more surreal as James encounters other souls trapped in the confines of Silent Hill. People with their own problems and anxieties. Every encounter they share with James leaves the lingering hint that they're not seeing the same thing that we are. And much like James are lost in hells of their own creation, they also serve as reflections of James' own insecurities. Chief among them Maria, a doppelganger to James' Mary, in all but character. She works at the local strip club, and thus her appearance is more scantily clad and seductive, as opposed to the more conservative portrayal we see of James' late wife. This woman that we're presented is the picture of how James seemingly wants to see his own wife. And when taken into account with the other sexually charged feminine imagery present in the form of the monsters of Silent Hill, we start to see a clearer picture of a sexually frustrated man caught in a situation that does not suit his needs and overwhelms him to the point of overreaction.
But perhaps that's not what you see when you play Silent Hill 2, and that's the beauty of it. If there's anything I appreciate most about the horror genre, it's the form's malleability for injecting metaphor and symbolism into storytelling. Ridley Scott's Alien is already a sublime film, but paired with understanding of its subtext enriches the story into something much higher than just plain genre fiction. This level of depth and complexity is rarely found in video game horror, a subset of the medium that often opts for revulsion, before even attempting to dive into any of the deeper layers of fear.
Silent Hill 2 stands as one of the few and most prominent examples of not just a horror narrative, but an interactive narrative in general that aspires to something grander than just simple scares. It conveys the feelings of a character through interaction, the most pervading of which being isolation. Not in the sense of being trapped by yourself in a godforsaken town run amok with hellish creatures hiding under the cover of dense fog, but the isolation that creeps in when a partner has exited one's life. For us as an audience, we interpret James's type of isolation as the one left by the vacancy of a departed partner, but as we embark on his journey we realize the feeling of isolation had seeped in well before James had ever arrived in Silent Hill. Stricken with an ailment she couldn't fight, James was forced into the role of Mary's caregiver, a role that pushed him further and further away from the relationship he had initially found himself in. So far away, in fact, that he was able to take the life of the woman that he figured had taken his. Overwhelmed by guilt for his actions, James willingly came to a town he knew Mary could not be in, looking to find judgment for his actions against her. And what sells this notion the most is his tenacity to soldier forward, despite no opposing force keeping him locked within the town. He knows exactly why he's here, even if we don't fully understand it the first time around. After he's endured the hardship of traversing Silent Hill, the consequences of his actions are, well, for you to decide.
This is where Silent Hill 2 transcends typical narrative that can be relayed in film or literature, and begins to take hold of the medium it exists in, for a tale that can only be told with the involvement of a player. Had it been made in our contemporary industry, Silent Hill 2 would likely feature highly dramatic and cinematic presentations of choices designed to lead you down narrowly branching paths. But created in our time, Silent Hill 2 was not, and thus, it features a choice-driven narrative that lingers in the shadows, never once alerting you to its presence. With the awareness of being watched, people will often perform, rather than react. The same principle holds true of video games, aware of the presence of choice, people will likely react differently than if they were tasked with pushing along a linear narrative.
In Silent Hill 2, you're never told what the repercussions of your actions will be, because there's no indication that your actions will result in anything other than reaching the end credits. Depending on how you treat James, whether it be keeping him healthy or taking no concern with his ailing state, among other varying factors, will dictate the ending you earn. And regardless of how you choose to manipulate these choices, the credits will force you into Silent Hill 2's final and arguably most important reflection: your own.
What the game manages to accomplish is leave me with a lingering sense of unease, long after I've finished playing. The source of which is the disturbing normality of James' pervading dilemma. It's the fact that we're all capable of being James that makes Silent Hill 2 so scary. We all have plans for ourselves, and more often than not the relationships that we enter. When the time finally comes, as it always does, and those expectations aren't met, disappointment can seep in. Given time to fester, disappointment metastasizes into a deep and burning resentment, the kind that drives partners to take drastic actions against one another. This is what Stephen King was talking about when he wrote about terror. The kind that lingers in the shadows. The kind that Silent Hill 2 forces us to see. The kind of terror that's only found in the mirror.