Silent Hill: American Horror
Music to Read This Article With: (link)
What if you were trapped inside an apartment and could not leave or interact with anyone else? That is the premise of the fourth entry into the Silent Hill series, featuring protagonist Henry Townshend. The photo above capturing the locked chains around his door and the furnishing of a modern American apartment.
Reviewing this game during its release, in 2004, would present the scenario described above as a novel idea. However, an audience of today would more immediately recognize and empathize with this horror. Many of us have felt trapped, isolated, and terrified over the course of the last two years because of a global pandemic.
When we start this game, the lock door and isolation is presented as the beginning of a unique problem facing Henry. He tells us that just a few days ago he stopped being able to leave his apartment and started having nightmares. He can still listen to the radio. He can still see people from his peephole and out his windows. But he can’t yell to them, he can’t use his phone, and even banging on his door doesn’t draw any attention.
But we learn something more interesting about Henry as we play this game. The life he led before the locks appear on his door and the one after are not fundamentally different. He was a loner, speaks nothing of family or friends, nor does anyone in the apartment really know anything about him. And this apartment does have a close community element to it, where everyone seems to know each other.
His entire place is clean and beyond a few pictures of Silent Hill that adorn his walls, there is no spark of personality or personhood inside his apartment. There is no evidence of him living a life there. Opening the fridge reveals a bottle of wine and chocolate milk, but no condiments or other food. Just who are you Henry?
He lives in what we could consider a performed American reality. A bookshelf full of books he has never read. Stocked photos in picture frames that he never talks about. Nothing on his fridge except a sales magnet to some business. Shoes by the door he doesn’t remember buying. And we find out later in the game that all of his furniture came with the place.
And this man, Henry, he is our protagonist.
Silent Hill Necessary Lore
Before we get into this article/review, it is essential to know that Silent Hill has always fundamentally been about the nature of reality, trauma, and horror. Specifically, that there is this mundane world we all interact with. The world we engage in with small talk and smiles. This world is pristine, beautiful, and ultimately fake.
Beneath this world is one of empty fog and real monsters manifesting. It is a world of horror, psychic projections, and guilt. It is what is real beneath the lies of comfort and security we tell ourselves.
Beneath the fog is a deeper layer of reality. One that is rust, blood, and chain fences with endless pits of nothing beyond them. It is valves and pipes, constantly turning and changing, existing as concrete impermanence. It is the true horrifying heart beat of our American legacy.
It would be wrong to tell you this is what Silent Hill is, because there aren’t definitive answers. Often Silent Hill is understood to be a dream or nightmare, as well as a living alternative reality. It has the capacity to influence our mundane world in the same way we can influence it.
When I explored frozen pizza and caffeine, I discovered something I never expected. I discovered how American these two things were. And they were American because we are a country of impermanence, industrialization, and horror.
Frozen pizza exists and became popular due to freezers and the need for mass food production. Caffeine was the original screw you to England, because fuck tea and it served as the stimulant that propelled American’s drug fueled “can do” attitude. American horror is the horror best understood through the common trope of “Built on an Indian Burial Ground”.
And while the manifestation and use of this trope has several problematic elements to it as discussed by Shea Vassar in an essay titled, “Digging Up the Indian Burial Ground Trope”, my focus isn’t strictly on the trope.
Silent Hill and American Horror are also fundamentally about isolation, confinement, hostile unstable environments, and the buried trauma we carry as we navigate life. When someone asks you how your day is going, you are supposed to tell them it is going great. That is American Horror.
When you’re anxious, depressed, or carrying heavy struggles — those are your own demons pal. And the demons in Silent Hill, as physical manifestations of these intangible mental struggles, reflect more truly to the real impact they have. It is no mistake Silent Hill often leaves you alone in these environments — As in the game, as in real life.
There are a lot of interesting things to say about the Silent Hill series as a whole and each individual game, but I’ll be focusing on the fourth entry.* If there is significant demand, I will explore the whole series further, but I’d really like to replay each game, watch the movies, read commentary, and otherwise spend probably a few hundred hours on it. So, not worth exploring the void that closely without more demand, given the important themes of the game will be summed up within this article. *
*Ninth Editor’s Note: Consider cutting everything after this sentence. It isn’t relevant to your article and interrupts the narrative flow of the piece. Never give the impression something would be difficult or time consuming, this will lower engagement and readability. Smile with your writing.
The Horror of Silent Hill Four
The atmosphere and by extension horror of this game relate to industrialized claustrophobia. The game starts with Henry inside of his apartment. We are first trapped by the lack of space in this environment.
It’s difficult and clumsy to navigate through hallways, furniture, and fixtures. And even though most of us choose to furnish our apartments in this exact way, we can’t help but feel limited by it. We constantly negotiate between freedom of space and the utility of couches or shelves.
While the wealthy can enjoy spacious houses, the working poor exist in a more compact life. Henry is trapped in a small space, he cannot leave his apartment due to the locks, and the only exit he discovers is a giant hole that has opened up in his bathroom — large yonic tunnel leading to a different world.
The first time he crawls through it, he finds himself in a subway station. Concrete tunnels and small metal shuttles of the subway train expand the industrialized claustrophobia to the underground systems of travel we’ve designed. Compact is after all efficient and cost productive. Elon Musk, the smartest man alive and true visionary, designed death tunnels for Teslas to reflect this horror perfectly.
Henry ends up meeting a lady down here and neither of them know what is going on. Except after she goes to vomit in a bathroom, strange dog-like creatures appear and attack Henry. After this Henry finds a hole back to his apartment. He wakes up in his bed and is left to wonder if it is simply a dream. Is he losing whatever grip on reality he currently has? Who is to say?
Returning through your Bathroom hole, brings you to…well the bathroom in the subway and a creepy mannequin holding a token for you to progress. At the end of this level you find the woman you were with murdered, numbers carved into her breast, and you comforting her with the notion that perhaps this is simply a bad dream.
You wake up.
You look outside your locked window and see an ambulance and police cars. You turn your radio on and learn a woman has been murdered. A copycat murder of Walter Sullivan’s killing spree a decade prior. Turns out that if you die in the dream, you die in real life.
These events at the start of the game create a point of stabilization. They suggest that what Henry is experiencing is real. And no matter the horror Henry faces throughout the game, there is no point where he cannot look out his windows to see the normal world. There is no point where he can’t see neighbors across the street just vibing in their own apartment or cars driving down the roads.
This helps to really highlight the isolation themes of Silent Hill by contrast and juxtaposition. Henry is physically isolated within his apartment by a magical lock, but he or you wouldn’t feel as trapped, without knowing that everyone else is free. And struggles with real isolation or mental health can feel just like that. Since everyone pretends to be okay, since everyone is socially conditioned to hide pain, we all feel isolated in our own misery while we think the rest of the world carries on just fine.
Perhaps all those people we see outside are just as trapped as we are?
The Forest World
Henry, having nothing else to do after witnessing a dreamland murder and being trapped in his apartment, crawls back into his bathroom hole. It grows larger and this time takes him to a forest outside of Silent Hill. Specifically, right next to Wish House, an orphanage/cult that tortured kids and wanted to bring about a god to purge the nation of Sin.
While this area is supposed to be a wooded kind of forestry place, we see it interspersed with factories, fences, and man-made caves. This represents how we’ve carved in claustrophobia within open environments and nature.
We learn more about the serial killer Walter Sullivan and his connection to the cult of Wish House. He was there as a young orphan and promised some dark ritual would revive his mother. We meet a man there who talks about indigenous practices of speaking with ancestors in Silent Hill, long before white settlers stole the land. Some hint that the mysterious and otherworldly nature of silent hill may have always been.
After some puzzles and explorations, we find ourselves at the basement of the orphanage with the friend we made along the way. He speaks as though insane and immolates himself with what appears to be joy before you wake up again. Critics of the game call the scene “metal as fuck”.
The Prison World
Henry wastes no time in jumping back into the ever increasing bathroom hole and then finds himself in a strange panopticonic environment. The industrialized claustrophobia in modern prisons is represented here and not dissimilar to the themes explored in the game The Beginner's Guide
We learn this was a prison developed by the cult to hold the kids from the Wish House orphanage. However, what we’re really doing is jumping into psychic memories of the serial killer Walter Sullivan. While we don’t know it at the time, the Subway and Forest were important locations within Walter’s life.
Each place has an added layer of reality to it, where Walter can manifest himself, monsters, and trap people into it. While these are worlds representative of Walter, he doesn’t have full control in them. Later in the game he even will even fight with the monsters you find, because they ultimately are his monsters.
The prison we’re in exists as a concrete lake monument with rotating floors. From the outside of this prison we cannot make out any landmarks or shores. This prison therefore does not actually exist. The prison is a projection of how Walter experienced the isolation, torture, and being locked up within Wish House. So, we understand each person we meet is simply a victim involved in Walter’s life in some way.
Our journey through this environment has us meeting a man that we understand will be an eventual victim if patterns persist. The man was a jail guard for the prison and we eventually find him floating dead before waking up. Pattern persisted.
The Building World
Wakey Wakey Holes in Bathroom — you get the picture. Henry finds himself in the Building world this time, which is just the roof of the building across the street from his apartment. The claustrophobia of this world is the tiny little shops and stairways that exist across our cities. We take vast space and reduce it, put up walls, call it our shop, and sell stuff.
This level features elevators, which reinforce that trapped notion, and chained fences all around the tops of the roof. This time we meet a man who has some idea of the situation, wields a revolver, and is ready to use it.
He tells us someone else got trapped and killed within our room, just before we moved in. Which is always terrible news to hear about where you’re living. This world repeats like last time and the man finds himself electrocuted to death.
The Apartment World
We are now within the apartment complex where we live, but the otherworldly version of it. The whole complex, much like the apartment environment at the start of the game, reinforce the claustrophobia of modern apartment living. Tiny hallways and little living areas of spaces subdivided again and again to fit a human’s total needs and no more.
This time the victim of the murder spree of Walter Sullivan is your neighbor and love interest Eileen Galvin. However, this one ends prior to her death due to a younger manifestation of Walter stopping the older ghost killer version of himself. It’s…complicated. Picture below should clear things up.
Hospital World
This brings us to our final world, the medical claustrophobia of hospitals. In this world, we seek out the still living Eileen, journey through dozens of tiny rooms in hopes of finding her, and rescuing her. Henry manages to do so and tells her that dying in this otherworld will mean she dies in real life.
The game now pivots in very important ways from a gameplay and story perspective. The rest of the game is traveling through each world again, but this time you are supporting and escorting an injured Eileen through them. She informs you that she feels like she is getting cursed and as you progress through the levels, if she is attacked or takes damage you can see the corruption slowly spreading across her.
Not only that, your apartment, which existed as a safe central hub of the game has now become broken and haunted. Just before rescuing Eileen you had to break a seal that was protecting you from ghost invasions. Now your apartment is not just claustrophobic, but often literally haunted. Windows rattle, ghosts roam, the faucet pours blood, and the walls can pulsate.
A modern rendition of the game could express this haunting as laundry or dishes slowly piling up. A much more visceral and internal fear of modern Americans.
A prior mechanic in the game was that Henry would heal while in his apartment to full health. At this point in the game, Henry only heals through items he finds in the world. And through the rest of the game you are fighting to survive the hauntings in your apartment, the monsters in the world, and protecting Eileen from becoming corrupt. Not just that, the serial killer Walter Sullivan is now after you and will appear in the levels you revisit with a fucking gun and bat. Dude is not playing.
The Story of Silent Hill Four
The story is complicated, but effectively the story follows the life of Walter Sullivan. A child who was abandoned as a baby in apartment 302 of South Ashfield Heights. He was turned over to a hospital, who turned him over to an orphanage named Wish House, located in Silent Hill. This orphanage was a front for a cult named “The Order” that dealt in ritual beliefs about bringing their god into the world through suffering. As a child, Walter was tortured and indoctrinated into believing in a ritual of the 21 sacraments to bring about the Holy Mother, which he incorrectly assumed was his mother.
As a young child, he learned of his birth place being apartment 302 that we start the game in. He would go visit that apartment regularly. He eventually disturbed the tenants of the apartment building and was chased off. He grew up, even attended school for a bit, before starting on the ritual of the 21 sacraments when he was twenty four years old. This involved him murdering ten individuals in a ritualistic way, then presumably killing himself as his eleventh victim. This happens ten years prior to the start of the game.
The murders stop after Walter is caught, convicted, and completes suicide inside of his cell with a spoon. However, copycat murders start to take place years later. What we learn is Walter’s ritual was successful and his death was part of it. He separated his body from his soul and is using his ghost to complete the work he started.
The last victim before the start of the game is a journalist named Joseph Scriber who was investigating Walter and Wish House. The journalist is living in room 302, likely as part of his investigative work. Before his death, he writes of being trapped in the apartment, about hauntings, ghosts, and the true nature of the ritual and how to stop it. He has been helping Henry the entire game by sliding notes under his door and gives Henry the final instructions on how to stop Walter.
The last victim is slated to be Henry Townshend. So, you’re the last victim. Towards the end of the game you finally connect that all the pieces are parts of Walter’s plan to awake the Holy Mother. That each place was tied to Walter’s memories and mental projections.
What you learn at the very end of the game is that there was a hidden room in your apartment. That the body of Walter Sullivan was crucified in this room. And once you break into it, you’re given the keys to finally leave. Except that the real world is now just as corrupted as the psychic, otherworldly locations you had visited.
You finally confront Walter in a final boss fight to stop him for good. Within this fight Eileen, who you’ve been escorting the entire time, is trapped walking forward into a spinning gyrator of doom. The gimmick in this fight is the more possessed she is the quicker she moves. And if she dies in this fight, she dies for real.
Once you defeat Walter, a few different things can happen depending on if Eileen is alive and on how successful you were in clearing hauntings in your home. The best ending involves keeping good care of home and family. The worst ending involves abandoning these things to let Walter corrupt the world unabated. Leaving you to see a corrupted version of your apartment and Walter standing there, finally happy.
The Real Story of Henry Townshend
The current understanding of the protagonist of Silent Hill Four is that he’s just an ordinary guy, caught up in a supernatural and horrifying situation far beyond his control. That he was a chosen victim simply because he happened to rent the apartment 302. The creators of the game speak about wanting to create the most sterile everyman to create a stronger contrast to the horror elements of the story and game.
However, dear reader, they’re all wrong.
I will say that I believe this reading of Henry that I went over above is the intended reading. However, when you analyze and theorycraft about a story what you want to do is create the most compelling narrative with the pieces offered. You have to respect the canon of the story, but not necessarily the intention of the creators.
I can’t for example suggest that Walter was a Sith Lord. That is insane. Unless…no, no, that doesn’t work. The theories you craft must be internally consistent with what the game offers you and logically extensions of the source material. The goal isn’t to create some far fetch fan theory, it is to tie the elements together into a satisfying conclusion that enhances the source material, not distract from it.
And just who the fuck is Henry Townshend? A photographer? A scrap booker? He doesn’t mention friends or family. He doesn’t have any numbers he thinks to try or call. He doesn’t talk about being worried about anything in his life. He barely reacts to terrifying and horrific murders, he readily kills monsters, and he remains relatively cool throughout the story.
The creators wanted to create a soft-spoken protagonist that was more passively impacted by the story that was ultimately about Walter. However, in the game you explore the apartments of the other tenants and each of them have at least one defining trait. There is the audiophile, the gym rat, the nurse, the lunatic, and the building’s superintendent. There is a painter who paints all of the residents. This building is a community. And everyone knows each other to some level. Each apartment has some aspect of personality to it, even if very limited and one dimensional.
This means they choose Henry to be extremely sterile. They choose him to have an apartment of a god damn serial killer. He isn’t an ordinary man, he is a no-man. And he is not a particularly interesting character when we consider him just a camera for us to walk around the world. He isn’t interesting if we consider him an ordinary man against the supernatural, because Harry Mason of Silent Hill One already did that.
So, who is Henry? Well, Henry is Walter Sullivan. He is a material manifestation of the humanity that was buried in Walter and escaped at the moment that Walter was implanted with Silent Hill’s God of Rebirth Vatiel.
Silent Hill One and Three feature this exact scenario. Silent Hill has a tortured girl who separates part of her soul from her body, that is reborn as a baby and grows up living a different life.
We are never given Henry’s exact age, but we know he’s in his twenties. If he was separated from and reborn from Walter, his age would line up perfectly. His connection to Silent Hill and apartment 302 would also be explained. His lack of any real personality, desire, or presence could also be justified by being a partial person. He lacks all of that, because those are things Walter kept. Henry is Walter Sullivan’s humanity.
The reason Henry is the last victim is because the last thing Walter needs to do is kill his own humanity. And the justification for this is that in the bad ending of the game. The ending where Walter wins. The events are Eileen dies and you kill Walter. So, how does Walter win in the ending where you kill him?
Because by killing Walter, Henry as the representation of his humanity, also dies. He becomes a murderer. This is exactly the same thing Claudia tried to do with Heather in Silent Hill Three to birth a god out of hate and anger.
When Henry’s humanity dies, his body becomes an empty vessel and completes the 21 Sacraments. Otherwise, how would we understand or explain the bad ending? What makes more sense for how Henry acts in the game and how little there is to him as a character. How does this game parallel with what we know of the cult and everything that came before?
There is an ending where you do lose Eileen, kill Walter, but keep your apartment relatively free of hauntings. This ending shows Henry waking up to discover Eileen has been murdered, but Walter has been stopped. A weak explanation for this is this apartment 302, Walter, and Henry are tied together in very important ways. If Henry keeps the apartment cleansed, he keeps himself cleansed enough to circumvent the ritual and effectively win as the soul that gets to live.
This is the real story of Silent Hill Four. Or Henry is just a random dude who really had one intense week. Whatever you prefer, dear reader.
American Horror
I started exploring this concept in response to some experiences I’ve had recently in my life. I’m still thinking about the woman I went on a date with last week and what impact hyper-dimensionality and hyperreality will have on our world.
I’m still searching for the ghost of Vonnegut for some answers and debating about giving Rabbit a call or not. Ĕ̴͈̓r̸̖̆͊o̴͍͛ has been relatively quite and I think that has something to do with the rogue AI that has been gunning for me since my Inscryption Story. The general spread of corruption has also abated. With not much going on, I played Silent Hill Four and saw how it connected to all of this.
The strange thing at this point is I don’t recall how I even came into possession of the game. Apparently it’s pretty rare? I don’t recall buying it. I’m sure I did, probably years ago, and just forgot about it. Time does that to a person.
Anyways, America has always been more prone to hyperreality, because we’ve always had less stable reality to ground ourselves in with cultural identity outside of industrialization. If you’re currently sitting there, still, somehow, in that black shirt, thinking that you don’t need to worry about postmodernism philosophy and hyperreality, I have bad news for you, you’re living in one!
I don’t mean there is a fog world with real monsters, I mean that we currently have concurrent realities. Was the vaccine for Covid-19 medically safe and effective? According to NPR about 15% of Americans will not get it. It is harder to figure out the exact number of beliefs around the vaccine, but regardless our realities split here. Some people believe it’s safe and effective, some people believe it’s worth it but has risks, some people believe its risks don’t outweigh the benefits, and others believe it is only harmful or a measure of control.
Some people believe the pandemic is fake in some capacity and the number of conspiracy around all of this is…intense.
A portion of our population believes that Donald Trump had the elections stolen from him, allegedly nearly 70% of Republicans believe to some extent we live in a stolen democracy. Conversely, 30% of Republicans believe that Biden won the election. What’s your flavor of reality?
These are not disagreements about the impact of an event, they are disagreements about reality. And while these are major events, these inconsistencies with reality exist in subtle ways throughout our culture. And I’m not saying things like hyper-partisanship are strictly American or that we’ve never seen disinformation, alternative facts, or double speak before. Technology is having this impact in many other countries to different degrees.
I’m saying that America is especially ripe for the impact of hyperreality, because it is an extension of industrialization, leading to post-industrialization, and lacking a centralized culture to stabilize against the automation and manipulation of reality. One can recognize something looks uncanny, only if they have some canny to refer to. If you’ve only interacted with AI Art, that’s what art looks like.
Silent Hill somehow understood this about America twenty years ago, probably because they’ve had to deal with the industrialization we brought to them after World War II. The corruption we help spread.
Silent Hill understood that underneath the realities we created about apple pie and picket fences, beneath it was something more horrifying, unstable, bloody, and iron. They saw the valves of this country as ever turning, with blood ever pumping, and bodies everywhere.
I don’t know how much they intended this with their games, but poetic imagery feels so perfect a capsulation of our country at the moment. And perhaps even more interesting is that Silent Hill and the horror worlds we explore are not worlds of doom. They are actually trials, challenges, and hope.
I played Silent Hill Four for the first time last week. But when I started the game, I knew that there was a good ending. I knew my actions determined that. And that I should work for it. That is the lesson of this game. It isn’t a judgment, it isn’t just horror for the sake of horror, but rather a possibility of transformation.
The central (arguably) positive theme of Silent Hill is a notion of rebirth. That the slate can be wiped clean and you can start over. Heather Mason of Silent Hill Three is effectively the third iteration of the original soul that was tortured to become a god. She prayed for her future self to find joy and she did.
James Sunderland within Silent Hill Two can redeem himself and meet dog. Henry Townshend can make a real connection with someone else and leave the apartment he had isolated in for years and maybe develop a single fricking hobby.
This undercurrent of rebirth is important, because it means there is hope. And this hope comes from confronting the world as it is. Not the mundane world we navigate, smile, and lie in. Not the foggy world of our projections and insecurities, but the real beating heart of our culture. We can reclaim or create our identity, when we process our trauma and heal. Until then, it is only fictions stacked on fictions, lies stacked on lies, and concurrent realities of hidden trauma masking as strength while we consume frozen pizza, down energy drinks, and slowly devour more and more space.
Regardless, I still have answers I need to find.
