In a 2013 Famitsu interview, Toyama talked about what influenced him in designing the original game. Almost every game in the franchise would also implement its own version of the comedic UFO ending. Later games would reference the Silent Hill games themselves, with Silent Hill 3 looping back on Harry Mason’s story and Silent Hill 4: The Room, connecting back to minor characters in 2 and 3. Silent Hill writer Hiroyuki Owaku would later carry those Lynchian influences into Silent Hill 2, which features a scene ripped from Blue Velvet, with Pyramid Head standing in for Frank Booth. Even the strange UFO endings now read as homage. One of the town’s bridges is named after Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle fame. Four teachers at Midwich Elementary are named after the members of Sonic Youth. In-game newspapers reference The Silence of the Lambs serial killer Buffalo Bill. The in-game map is filled with streets named after genre writers like James Ellroy, Carl Sagan, Robert Bloch, Michael Crichton, and Richard Matheson. Silent Hill is, after all, a love letter to the team’s influences. Someone on the team just really likes Kindergarten Cop, a very strange and tonally chaotic movie, and wanted to give Reitman’s highest-rated Schwarzenegger vehicle (above Junior and Twins) its due props. Both are stories about missing children, and both happily end with the male lead becoming a new father figure. Some argue the influences go deeper, like that Silent Hill’s protagonist Harry Mason is dressed similarly enough to Schwarzenegger’s John Kimble. We deliberately did not use an actual place, since it might cause inconsistency with the real thing.” “Of course, Silent Hill really does not exist, and we have not allocated a certain place or time in the game. A traditional town in the countryside is the setting for the game, where it creates the weirdness and the eeriness in the ordinary world.” Silent Hill director Keiichiro Toyama told PSM magazine in a 1999 interview that “the game was supposed have a ‘modern American novel’ type of atmosphere. The Silent Hill development team turned to Kindergarten Cop, released in 1990, to give their game an authentic small-town American feel, from the yellow school busses to the posters that decorate the school hallways. (In the movie, it’s called Astoria Elementary, but it’s a real-world grade school named John Jacob Astor Elementary.) It’s directly based on the school from Kindergarten Cop, as the below video thoroughly illustrates. The biggest reference is with Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary School - which pulls its name from Village of the Damned. That may be the strangest revelation about Team Silent’s groundbreaking horror title, more so than any bizarre UFO or shiba inu-related secret ending in the franchise. It wasn’t until the following decade that hardcore Silent Hill fans uncovered the undeniable influence of Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy movie Kindergarten Cop on the design and architecture of the game. Playing the original Silent Hill for the first time back in 1999, many of its influences were immediately apparent: Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror movie 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |