Play the original silent Hill First appearing in 1999, many of his influences were immediately recognizable: Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror film Jacob’s ladder and adaptation of Lolita; William Peter Blattys The Exorcist 3; Stanley Kubrick The glow; the science fiction and horror works of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Dean Koontz.
That didn’t happen until the following decade Hardcore silent Hill fans revealed the undeniable influence of the comedy of Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger Kindergarten police officer about the design and architecture of the game. This may be the strangest reveal about Team Silent’s groundbreaking horror title, more so than any bizarre UFO or Shiba Inu-related secret ending in the series.
The biggest reference is with silent Hill‘s Midwich Elementary School – from which it takes its name Village of the Damned. It is based directly on the school of Kindergarten police officer, as the following video illustrates in detail. (In the movie it’s called Astoria Elementary, but it’s a a real elementary school called John Jacob Astor Elementary.)
The silent Hill The development team reached out Kindergarten police officer, released in 1990, to give their game an authentic small-town American feel, from the yellow school buses to the posters that adorn the school hallways. Some argue that the influences go deeper than that silent HillHarry Mason’s protagonist is dressed similarly to Schwarzenegger’s John Kimble. Both are stories about missing children and both end happily with the male protagonist becoming the new father figure.
I choose to believe a different truth. Just someone from the team Really Likes Kindergarten police officera very strange and tonally chaotic film, and intended to be Reitman’s highest-rated Schwarzenegger vehicle (above). Junior And Twins) its due props.
silent Hill is ultimately a declaration of love to the team’s role models. The in-game map is full of streets named after genre authors such as James Ellroy, Carl Sagan, Robert Bloch, Michael Crichton and Richard Matheson. Reference to newspapers in the game The silence of the Lambs Serial killer Buffalo Bill. Four teachers at Midwich Elementary are named after members of Sonic Youth. One of the city’s bridges is named after Genesis P-Orridge, of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle fame. Even the weird UFO endings now read as homage.
silent Hill The writer Hiroyuki Owaku would later carry these Lynch influences Silent Hill 2in which a cut scene can be seen Blue velvet, with Pyramid Head filling in for Frank Booth. Later games referenced the Silent Hill games themselves Silent Hill 3 Back to Harry Mason’s story and Silent Hill 4: The Rooma connection to secondary characters in 2 And 3. Almost every game in the series would also implement its own version of the comedic UFO ending.
In a 2013 Famitsu interview silent Hill Director Keiichiro Toyama spoke about what influenced him when creating the original game.
“I’ve never liked the really gory, shocking horror films, so I was a little perplexed at first,” Toyama said. “I’m a fan of occult things and UFO stories and so on; that and I had seen a lot of David Lynch films. So it was really about me taking what was on my shelves and taking the more horror-oriented aspects of what I found. I really didn’t think [Silent Hill] It really was a horror game and it was kind of a surprise to me when people told me it was scary after it came out!”
Luckily for self-confessed scaredy-cats like Toyama, this horror can be alleviated somewhat by thinking about it differently silent Hill than just a nightmare in the world of Kindergarten police officer.
