The Silent Hill That Roared

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2006)

There's good reason to be afraid if you go to see "Silent Hill". It was directed by a relatively untested Frenchman entirely new to the Hollywood scene, its producers refused to screen it to American critics, it's received schizophrenically mixed reviews, and, worst of all, is based upon a video game. Scary stuff.
However, I'm willing to bet that if you approach "Silent Hill" with an open mind and some basic literacy in Japanese horror, all those middling fears will be entirely subsumed by the far greater terrors which await you in the town of Silent Hill.
For Silent Hill proves to be quite the eerie place. A small mining town abandoned long ago since the town's coal mines caught fire, slaughtering most of the town's inhabitants and igniting ashy infernos which continue to cover the town in soot to this very day, it's the kind of place you'd never consider visiting. Unless, that is, your adopted daughter keeps screaming the words "Silent Hill" in the midst of dangerous sleepwalks and you, the concerned mother, decide to take your daughter to the source of her nightmares to puzzle the whole thing out.
Which is precisely the situation Rose (Radha Mitchell) and her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) soon find themselves in. Rose soon begins to regret her decision when she crashes her S.U.V., is knocked unconscious, and wakes up to find her daughter missing in a town populated with supernatural beasties. Throw in Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden), a kind-hearted cop sucked into Rose's hellish ordeal, Christopher (Sean Bean) as Rose's distraught husband in search of his missing wife and daughter, a puritanical cult, a healthy serving of altered realities, and some of the most terrible depictions of diabolical evil committed to the silver screen, and you've got one terrifying, if slightly confusing, film.
Indeed, so satisfying did I find the film that I have difficulty understanding the negative press which has assailed "Silent Hill". Sure, the acting was not the best at time, but in an R-rated horror film, who cares about the acting as long as plenty of people get brutally eviscerated by demons from alternate dimension? (Warning  "Silent Hill" is not for the squeamish.) All that I can imagine is that some American viewers could not understand the movie because they are unfamiliar with the fundamental tropes of Japanese horror and video gaming, both of which heavily influence the film.
So, a crash course. Japanese horror might be better compared to American suspense thrillers in that the fear derives not so much from monsters behind doors and excessive gore, as from the unknown. Hence the predominance of ghastly little girls, for what can be more foreign to your average living male adult theater-goer than the mind of an undead female child? So often in Japanese horror films, what goes on is deliberately confusing, for if it could be easily understood, it would not be as scary. Further, the Japanese often focus on the emotional manifestations of terror such as ghosts and poltergeists, than concrete, physical bogeyman, such as serial killers.
So if you go to see "Silent Hill," just remember that you might not see everything you might want to see, and so you might feel a bit confused. But stop to feel for a second: Are you afraid? If so, "Silent Hill" has done its job, and I'm willing to nominate the film for Employee of the Month.