The Aestethic of Horror

Rating: 10/10 (26 August 2006)

You don't like Videogames? Well, maybe you get interested after watching this Movie. "Silent Hill" is by far one of the best Horror-Flicks in years and for sure the most brilliant Video game-Adaption up to date. This is what "Resident Evil" and "Doom" should have been: a creepy and mind-blowing trip into the dark realms of the human mind. What makes this movie special is the great aesthetic the pictures and scenes contain. In some areas it reminded me about the Vision Clive Barker must have had with "Hellraiser" which in no way lived up to its novel expectations. The Ghost Town of Silent Hill, condemned to darkness by a revenge-forced mind, gives you the creeps and it is as close to the game as it could get. The creatures are projections of madness and they work well on the big screen exactly like they do on the TV-Monitor. They are a perfect reflection of darkness and insanity, dwelling in human minds. But the real horror is the religious fanaticism the last inhabitants of Silent Hill are showing, which causes all the trouble anyway. With the "witchhunt" subject they come extremely close to the fearsome, destructive potential of our reality.
The idea of a parallel dimension (parallel dimensions) works excellent and I love the part where the husband and his wife are in the same room the same time, he in our reality and just feeling her, she you can say "in hell", fighting for her life. A quite disturbing situation that gets its ultimate creepiness in the end sequence...
Silent hill is a true experience in horror, recommendable not only for fans of this genre, but for everybody who enjoys a piece of art in movie-making too. Fascinating and Disturbing.