By Anthony Cain
So here I am, sitting at my desk in the more serviceable wing of the ruined abbey that has been the Cain family’s ancestral seat since 1639, watching snowflakes the size of small dogs drift down from a bruised-looking sky.
I have returned to Britain, you see, in order to clear my name of a spurious food counterfeiting charge. The weather’s terrible, wish you were all here.
Seeing as the snow has been falling for a long time now I’ve been stuck inside, and the resultant abbey-fever has forced me to resort to quiet contemplation of some of the bigger questions in life. The most pressing and important one is, and always shall be, which is better: the Resident Evil series of games, or the Silent Hill sequence?
I know it’s probably all just a matter of taste, but I can’t help feeling that a decision has to be made. And preferably now. Especially since the PlayStation joystick calluses on my thumbs have stopped me playing for a few hours. So allow me to take a moment or twenty of my recuperation time to think carefully about … well, the games I’d be playing if I wasn’t writing this.
First, it must be said, came Resident Evil. And all other games —especially the ones that claimed to have elements of horror in them— quaked in their suddenly soiled clothing. Forget the blocky graphics and the worst voice-acting in the history of —well anything, actually— and just spare a moment’s respect for that grandfather of the survival horror genre, RE.
Up until then, I’d never really found my game amongst the titles of the PlayStation catalogue. Sure, I’d enjoyed some of them; had even finished one or two, but there was no one title that I could gleefully say “yeah, this is what my life has been missing”. Resident Evil changed all that. Suddenly I was pitched into the middle of a horror movie that needed me if it was all going to turn out okay. A relentless (and yes, often repetitive) battle against the forces of darkness, Resident Evil was kinda like being slap bang at ground zero when a George A. Romero movie unfolded around you. And that soft, padding sound the giant spiders made as they moved in closer to you; that was scary, man, really damned scary.
Then came the wonder that was Resident Evil 2. The graphics had been tweaked and tightened; the shocks fine-tuned; even some of the voice-acting improved. Okay, there were still lots of repetitive bits that you just had to buckle down to and get through, but the story was cool and the action cooler. I was playing it late at night —I mean when else can you play these games?— the first time that Leon encountered a licker in the corridors of the overrun police station and I had to pause the game when the battle was over because it rattled me that much.
Things get frantic real fast and there’s little time to get over one shock and you’re pitched full-tilt into the next. Zombies and those ugly half-peeled dog things chase you from one location to the next; mutant freaks burst out all over; carnivorous plants spit acid at you; and countdowns to destruction make the adrenaline race.
And while you’re playing, you tend to forget about the sheer preposterousness of the game. I mean, of course, the way that the Umbrella Corporation operate all the doors in their complexes. I try to imagine a non-zombie infested day at Umbrella, a pre-Resident Evil, ordinary day at the office. You’re on the third floor, and you have to pop down to the stationery cupboard for a stapler. But first you have to make your way to another part of the building altogether and move boxes around with a crane so that you can find the wings of a black wasp. Then it’s down to the sewers with you, where a problem involving drainage pumps and a crank handle will give you the wasp’s body. You fit them together and then —voila!— you have the stationery cupboard key.
Now you’ve just got to retrieve the stairwell key from where you hid it, behind the face of the clock in the compound, but first you’ve got to get the cogs from three other locations …
But I digress.
Res 3 was dreadful. Whatever tension it managed to create was quickly dispelled by the arrival of the pantomime villain Nemesis. It just annoyed me. It made me hate the game too much.
Then I discovered Silent Hill. And things changed. Oh boy ,did they change. In Resident Evil games I was always fighting for my survival because I was a member of S.T.A.R.S. and that was kinda my job. I’d happen into a mansion, or a zombie-overrun city and I’d have to fight my way out. It was a simple formula. One I’d grown to love. There was no deep psychological point to it all, no emotional engagement save fear, panic and the occasional stints of boredom. It was thrills for thrills sake. It was fun and nothing but.
The same wasn’t true of the Hill, though.
You find that out within three minutes of playing the game. Silent Hill started with my character’s daughter disappearing. And Harry Mason had to find her. And for the duration of the game, I was Harry Mason. She was my daughter. It was the best motivation for finishing a game that I’d ever happened upon.
And it wasn’t going to be easy. A malign fog swirled around me, concealing much of the town I was supposed to be searching. I followed a figure down an unpleasant alleyway decorated with the dead bodies of unknown creatures, and scary details like empty wheelchairs with their wheels still spinning. Horrible industrial sounds started up. Things got dark. I lit a match. Ugly, brutal creatures grabbed hold of me. I had no weapons. There was nowhere to run. They killed me.
I woke up. All a dream? Nope, no such luck. Harry’s daughter was still missing. So armed with a handgun, a flashlight and a radio I was going to have to find her.
Where Resident Evil had skated close to the fear that comes from a great horror novel or a classic horror film, Silent Hill managed to cross over and become as important to the genre as any book or movie. It played quite similarly to RE, but only as far as game mechanics. Sure there were puzzles to solve and baddies to kill, rooms to search and dull bits where you’re lost and haven’t a clue what you’re supposed to be doing next; but at its —exceedingly dark and elegantly crafted— heart there was an engagement with character and plot that was light years beyond what RE has ever managed.
And it was scary. Oh yes. Oh yes indeed.
And where Resident Evil has sought to expand itself into a franchise through similarity, with innovations to the formula being in the areas of “new things I can do”, the Silent Hill experience is founded upon plot and characters, upon the details that separate “great horror” from “just horror”.
Where RE 3 left me feeling cheated, Silent Hill 3 made me feel like I had been given a rare and precious look into a fictional world that I both loved and feared.
For true horror, where that essential paradox of dark fiction is played out, I think I have found the answer to the question I set out to answer.
Which is good, because I still have to get the wacky alien ending in Silent Hill 3, and the pain in my thumbs has abated. And the snow certainly hasn’t. I may be here a while.
See you next time.