Silent Hill (film)

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Mother is God in the eyes of a child.

Silent Hill is a loose film adaptation of Silent Hill 1 which also draws inspiration from several other Silent Hill games (notably Silent Hill 2, due to the film's usage of Pyramid Head).

Rose Da Silva's adopted daughter Sharon is plagued by nightmares in which she repeatedly mutters shrieks about a town named "Silent Hill". Hoping to find some answers, Rose takes Sharon to Silent Hill, but she crashes her car on the way -- and things keep getting worse from there.

A sequel film based on Silent Hill 3 -- Silent Hill: Revelation -- recently finished filming and is in post-production. The cast includes Adelaide Clemens (as Heather Mason), Martin Donovan (as Douglas Cartland), Kit Harington (as Vincent Carter), Carrie-Anne Moss (as Claudia Wolf), and Malcolm McDowell (as Leonard Wolf). Returning from the first film are Sean Bean (as Christopher Da Silva / Harry Mason), Radha Mitchell (as Rose Da Silva), and Deborah Unger (as Dahlia Gillespie), though their role in Revelation's story is unknown.


Tropes used in Silent Hill (film) include:
  • And I Must Scream: Hung over coals. Not hot enough to set you ablaze, but just enough to literally cook your skin while people stand around and watch. eeek.
  • Alternative Foreign Theme Song: In the Japanese version, Anna Tsuchiya's "Lovin' You" is used.
  • Arc Words: "Mother is God in the eyes of a child".
  • Asshole Victim: Christabella, her fellow cultists, and Colin.
  • Body Horror: Most of the monsters that appear are pretty horrific although they are all based on the video game monsters save Colin the Janitor - who it is hinted either molested or raped Alessa leading to him now being strung up by barbed wire, tying his legs to his head, more barbed wire going into his eyes, and he is forced to crawl around on his hands and genitals.
    • The fate of Christabella and the cult members is grisly.
  • Burn the Witch
  • Canon Immigrant: The transformation effect from when the world transits to another plane of reality was used in games after the film's release.
  • Chronically-Killed Actor: Turned on its head as almost everyone but Sean Bean dies.
  • Creepy Cockroach: Or rather, cockroach-like monsters with screaming human faces on their underside.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: Cybil is very graphically burned alive, gasping for her mother. Also, Chrisabella and the cultists.
  • Doing It for the Art: Every monster in the movie is a person inside a suit, with some CGI effects added afterwards. Unfortunately many people ended up thinking them as shoddy CGI, due to their unnatural movements, which in fact are the result of the skill of their actors, and unusual camera techniques in shooting them; for example, the bubble-head nurses were choreographed doing their movements backwards, and the film was then reversed for the effect.
  • Distaff Counterpart: Rose to Harry; the director changed the main character's gender because he felt like the main character of the video game was very feminine already because he cared about his daughter enough to look for her. Also Harry was thought to have screamed and fainted too much, and being male clashed with their film's theme of motherhood.
  • Downer Ending: Rose is stuck in Silent Hill version of her home while her husband is not. They are literally in the same room at the same time but in different worlds.
  • Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: A recurring theme of this movie. See Arc Words.
  • Evil Makes You Monstrous: The burned Alessa in the otherworld has become, essentially, a demon given over to hate and rage.
  • Evil Versus Evil
  • Gainax Ending
  • Ghibli Hills: Inverted, but technically counts. The backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous, and actually look like what Silent Hill might look like in real life.
  • Groin Attack: Christabella gets a gruesome one before she is ripped in half, courtesy of Alessa's barbed wire.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Cybil.
  • Hot Mom: Rose seems meant to be this, considering the first shot in the movie is her in a tight tank top and short-shorts.
  • I Have Many Names: Alessa's Dark Side tells this to Rose.
  • Karmic Death: Christabella as well as most of the people inside the Church get torn into pieces from the inside by demonic barbed wires controlled by the very child whose life they had turned into a living hell all those years ago
  • Kids Are Cruel: Alessa's classmates.
  • Marionette Motion: The nurses.
  • Meanwhile Back At The - To contrast the Dark World with the regular version, Rose's husband is shown wandering the same (non-Dark) parts of Silent Hill as Rose.
  • My God, What Have I Done? - Dahlia
  • Not a Zombie: Cybil tries to get a zombie-like creature to lie down by waving her gun at it.
    • Made worse by the fact that it doesn't even look vaguely human.
  • Real Place Background: Some of the outdoors scenes were shot in the downtown section of Brantford, Ontario. A local joke is that all the set dressers had to do was add garbage cans and ask everyone to leave for a few days.
  • Rule of Symbolism: Quite a bit of it, since this is a Silent Hill movie, though not as much as the games, since it mixes elements from the other games in. Most obvious is the fact that Rose's dress slowly changes from a soft blue to a deep, blood red as the movie progresses.
  • Single-Issue Wonk: There are droves of people who condemn the movie as garbage simply because they made Harry Mason a female for the film.
  • Sinister Scraping Sound: Pyramid Head again.
  • Stupid Sacrifice: CYBIL.
  • Trailers Always Lie: In one part of the previews for the movie it showed Alessa saying in a demonic voice "I am the reaper." She does say it, just in her regular speaking voice.
  • Treacherous Spirit Chase: Rose is spurred further into the obviously treacherous town by fleeting sightings of Alessa, who looks identical to her missing daughter Sharon.
  • Vasquez Always Dies: Cybil.
  • Woman Scorned: Alessa.