When you mention the name "Silent Hill" to a gamer,
the first image that comes to mind, other than monsters and gore,
is that of a town covered in fog. On the surface,
the fog might just seem like a cool aesthetic choice for a horror game - not knowing what deadly entity might be steps away is
naturally frightening. Plus, including an impenetrable fog definitely helped with hardware limitations at the time.
Yet upon doing research into the Silent Hill series,
as well as some personal reflection, the fog takes on a much more horrific
psychological meaning. For this video,
I will be presenting what facts have been established about the Fog World, and its cyclical
transition into the Other World as well. In order to tie some loose story threads, I'll be injecting my own
interpretations where necessary.
What can we say for certain about the Fog world and the Other World?
All official Silent Hill documents say that the fog/mist and the darkness blurred the line between dream and reality. It's an unsettling description
that is as unclear as the fog and darkness referenced, and it leaves us with more questions. The most pertinent
question regarding both worlds is probably why Silent Hill constantly switches between them?
The 1999 guidebook answers this.
"For the sake of convenience,
this will be referred to as the 'right side' and
'reverse side' in this book. In the same way that a person normally repeats rapid-eye-movement sleep and
non-rapid-eye-movement sleep in regular cycles while he or she is sleeping, when the nightmare world approaches a deeper darkness,
a phenomenon occurs in which light is almost completely taken away
and the world shifts into an even deeper
nightmare as the cycle shifts again. As for the 'right side' and the 'reverse side,' in short,
it isn't that one is reality and one is a dream; the fact is that neither is reality."
So we know that the cycle between the fog world and the other world is like a dream. As you fall asleep,
you may be at the stage of your dream where your eyes are closed and all you can see behind
your eyelids is a shifting nothingness, almost like the fog in
the Fog World. Is my guess that the fog in Silent Hill is sort of like the fog of the mind, given
materialized form. If certain parts of the town are products of the unconscious mind given physical form,
why not the fog? An official Silent Hill document inadvertently confirms this hypothesis with the following:
"The mist can also be interpreted as the thoughts of the dead, rising up from the lake and settling over the town."
And as you begin to dream, things start to appear out of that fog as if from nowhere,
Be it the fog of the mind or the fog of Silent Hill. If it's a nightmare,
sometimes you'll see monsters. The deeper into sleep that you get, as you delve into your subconscious,
as you transition from non-REM sleep to REM sleep, the fog clears and things become a whole lot more vivid,
lucid and sometimes horrifying. Depending on how deep you descend into that darkness, things might seem so real
that you are unable to tell if you're dreaming or if you're awake.
The next obvious question regarding the two worlds is why the Other World seems so decrepit and
sadistic? All official documents seem to suggest that depending on how much darkness, or light, you hold in your heart,
how corrupted or uncorrupted your spirit is, the power of the town latches on to that and
manipulates reality accordingly. In the first game, the character of Alessa's heart held so much darkness
that Silent Hill could feed off of just her psychic energy.
Therefore the world and the monsters we see are all
projections of her unconscious mind. However, in Silent Hill 2,
when Alessa is no longer in the picture, the town needs a new source, or
sources, to feed off of. The town's
architecture and the monsters then become projections of one's unconscious mind. Depending on how corrupted your soul may be,
you might perceive the world around you as a
fiery Hell, like the character of Angela does, or as an ordinary world like Laura. Like I
established in the first video in this series, Silent Hill's power isn't
necessarily evil, even though its power may have been distorted over the centuries. Finally,
I found it interesting that the 1999 guidebook called the Other World the "reverse side."
I think an interesting way of interpreting this is that maybe the world of Silent Hill takes a person or a thing in our
reality and turns it into the worst possible version of itself, hence the reverse side term. For example,
instead of a wall of concrete you have a wall of skin. In the case of Silent Hill's classic villain, Pyramid Head, and the town's
executioner, which it was supposedly based off of. Instead of a hood, you get a heavy rusted pyramid.
But this is just an interpretation and I have nothing to back this up with.
Have you ever wondered why there are various road blocks throughout the town?
Have you ever wondered why there are so many doors that are locked?
The answer is partially obvious - you go to the locations in the game that are necessary to advance the story and gameplay forward.
Yes, that is correct.
But, dot-dot-dot, there's another way of looking at this that involves Silent Hill's
projections of the mind. When you are dreaming, does your dream play out like a movie or
like normal life? Sometimes it seems like normal life,
but more often than not it's like a movie. Unlike real life, movies and dreams do not contain the boring,
unimportant activities that go on in everyday life, but contain scenes and images that tell a story, that
communicates something of underlying importance. If you're watching a movie about a hero going to slay a dragon
you don't care about his hygiene habits or his day job as a farmer, unless those things somehow play into the core of the story.
The roads are blocked and the doors are locked, sometimes, because if we go in that direction
we're not letting the dream go along its natural course. The unnecessary
parts of reality break off in the Fog World, and the parts relevant to the journey
remain. Another way of looking at the roadblocks and locked doors
is that taking the easy path doesn't always lead to enlightenment.
We have to go down a difficult path in order to achieve the greatest reward.