The Silent Hill online game franchise is lastly prepared for an actual return, with a brand new recreation set to be introduced on Wednesday. This newest revival of the sequence additionally means it’s the right time to revisit the secretly nice authentic Silent Hill film. While horror-seekers and online game followers of 2006 bristled at the truth that the film didn’t keep true to the supply materials, a decade of (largely) dangerous Silent Hill entries has confirmed simply how good the film actually was.

The film follows Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) and her husband Christopher (Sean Bean), who’re fearful about their daughter, Sharon (Jodelle Ferland), and her fixed sleep strolling and muttering about a spot known as Silent Hill. Eventually, in determined hope for an answer, Rose takes Sharon and seeks out Silent Hill for solutions. The pair shortly develop into trapped within the haunted ghost city — together with a police officer named Cybil Bennett (Laurie Holden), who tries to cease them from crossing the city limits and will get pulled in herself. Sharon then disappears, sending the 2 girls on a seek for the lady by means of Silent Hill, the place they encounter a few of the online game sequence’ most well-known monsters.

Image: Davis Films/Konami

While the film’s monsters and gore provide a creepy cinematic journey to gaming’s most well-known ghost city, one of the best a part of the Silent Hill film is the metaphor at its middle. Director Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf) and screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) devise a narrative that grapples with the methods women and men can view the world in another way, and the way in which that threats in opposition to girls can go unnoticed by the lads round them.

Shortly after Rose and Sharon depart, Christopher follows them, realizing they could be headed to Silent Hill. When he arrives, all he finds is an empty city. For him, Silent Hill is quiet and unpopulated, nevertheless it nonetheless feels haunted, whereas for the ladies it’s a monster-filled nightmare. The similar streets the place he sees nothing, they discover threats on each nook and prowling each alley, inside their very own horrifying dimension that he has no entry to. While they continue to be in mortal hazard, one thing he feels however can’t even see or work together with, he’s powerless to assist.

Image: David Films/Konami

To pull this off, the film usually turns its horror aesthetics on a dime. It expertly morphs from a monster-action film, because the characters desperately flee from a contemporary horror (a herd of undead nurses, for instance), to a slow-burn, dread-soaked drama as Christopher realizes he may not be capable to assist his spouse in any respect, or as Rose fears she might have misplaced her daughter to the horrors of Silent Hill.

None of this makes for a refined metaphor, however in a film that features monsters like Pyramid Head, it in all probability shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, it’s an efficient one — and it’s one which was nonetheless largely misplaced on viewers when the film got here out in 2006, an period dominated by post-Saw-sequel “torture porn.” Combine that with the truth that the film took a number of inventive liberties at a time when the sport sequence was nonetheless in its heyday, and it’s no shock that this stays one of many hidden online game film gems.

Silent Hill is accessible to stream on AMC+ by means of Prime Video and FuboTV. It can be out there for digital rental or buy by way of Amazon and Apple.