The smell of shit might knock a horse down. too terrifying. There were flies everywhere, a pile of feces and a wet toilet rolling just a few centimeters from the edge of the toilet. To make matters worse, my favorite screwdriver is now at the bottom of the pot.
Before writing this article, I was a plumber and gas station worker in Glasgow from 2003 to 2009. I'm not working on a construction site, but as a maintenance engineer, he spends the whole day working throughout the city, installing heating systems, installing showers, and clearing people's toilets.
In this particular job, I isolated the customer ’s problematic toilet and suggested that I order repairs after I ordered the necessary accessories from the warehouse. The apartment has a second bathroom and I am assured that during this period unqualified debris will be excluded.
When the parts arrived, the customer struggled to rearrange the work. After two full weeks, I returned to the house and was taken to the scene. I started preparing the accessories, and after about ten minutes, I realized that the toilet seat was closed, which was since I arrived. There is a faint smell of poop in the air, but it is not uncommon to associate odors in plumbing games. I eliminated my slight concern. Until I lifted the lid and found the Holocaust.
It's devastating. The owner's children did not receive the memo, the note disappeared, and they continued to use the toilet for 14 days without flushing. Frightened, I pumped backwards, hitting the small group of fruit flies flying around, and my favorite screwdriver spilled into the soup from the pocket of the work clothes. It sank to the bottom. Damn it.
From there, I have two options: clear the blockage and throw away the screwdriver, or roll up the sleeves, and then deep down my shoulders to restore my precious gizmo. Let me be clear, although we may have learned from Silent Hill 2, Option 2 is by no means an option.
But James Sutherland made money in a clogged bowl in a locker at Blue Creek Apartments, which is not the only unorthodox relationship between the Silent Hill series and the toilet (this scene itself was later in Silent Hill 3 was mocked by Heather Mason, suppose you let SH2 save the data to your PS2 memory card). Throughout the survival horror anthology, there are a large number of nodding sounds from toilets, bathrooms and public toilets-from the first run-in with the bubble-head nurse to the screams behind the door, mirrors, and holes leading to another world Even at PT, abandoned fetuses are discarded in wash basins.
As a former plumber, this always fascinates me. I have been sitting on the throne for some time, and for the past few years, I have been following some of the key figures behind Silent Hill's shit house. Hey, this is a dirty job, but someone must do it. First, Akira Yamaoka, the famous composer of the Silent team.
"I was not asked this question," Akira san told me with a smile through a translator. "I think washrooms are usually a quiet and quiet place, but at the same time we are vulnerable. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is probably the most noteworthy For example, it uses this setting to explore the (darker) theme in the genre of horror, which in Silent Hill is usually related to a different world.
"At Silent Hill 2, when he talked to James about the scene, he was desperate. The game was still early, so he was still studying what was going on and his place in all aspects. He would do everything he could to move on. After all, this is someone who went to Silent Hill after receiving a letter from the dead wife, so everything is possible. He wants to understand what happened, why the world around him collapsed, and if it meant doing it, he wouldn't usually do it The thing that is what he needs to do.
"When Heather opened it on Silent Hill 3 players, she was breaking the fourth wall. In" Silent Hill 4: The Room ", Henry's bathroom took the player to Walter's "Other worlds", so there is a connection there as well. Throughout the series, the washrooms at Alchemilla Hospital are often dangerous places, which reflects our fears and hopes for hospitals.
"At least I think so, but the rest of the (silent team) may be the best person to ask."
Keeping in mind the weirdness of that toilet scene, I contacted Silent Hill 2 artist and designer Masahiro Ito via email, and they accidentally announced their participation in an unknown project earlier this year. I asked the Blue Creek apartment; why the protagonist James broke into the toilet with a bare hand and even hinted that the world around him was collapsing; and why the toilet usually plays such an important role in the makeup of the series
Another technical observation I made while at the scene of the illness was that after taking the wallet out of the urinal in room 203, the toilet was still blocked. Others must prevent U-bends, but what? I asked Masahiro san and this apparently disoriented my query in translation.
Ito replied in an email: "Strictly speaking, these are Owaku Hiroyuki's characters." "However, I don't think it is necessary to go to the toilet again."
Ito seems to think that I didn't play the role of plumber after robbing James. I find this very interesting. Honestly, given that James has put his hand in, I don't actually think this is unreasonable. If he does his best, why not check for further blockages? I mean, who knows, maybe this is a key project? Maybe a copy of the video from the Lakeview Hotel? Of course, this can save a lot of time.
It's a shame that Masahiro Ito doesn't have contact information for Hiroyuli Owaku, and my attempts to connect with programmers and designers in the first four games of Silent Hill were short. After the Silent team disbanded after the release of SH 4: The Room in 2004, IMDB asked him to write lyrics for the Karaoke Revolution series, and then collaborated with Ito again to produce several Japanese exclusive Silent Hill-style comics. The Silent Hill Wiki identified Owaku as "retired" and I was able to confirm with Konami's public relations department that although he was appointed executive producer of the Busou Shinki series in 2017, he no longer works for the company.
After a series of inquiries, I entered the Silent Hill: Homecoming in 2008. The shoes of the former Special Forces soldier, Alex Shephard, filled the bathroom. This was the player's first contact with a zombie nurse and their first transition to Outland. And you think the standards of the garbage factory in this area are questionable.
Jason Allen, then the chief designer of developer Double Helix Games, emphasized that his views were personal, not those of Konami or Double Helix, but he inadvertently echoed some of Yamaoka's views.
Allen said: "Hitchcock's" Psycho "has a famous shower scene, and almost every horror film has an" thing "hidden behind the shower curtain or in the closet." "The bathroom may be the main part of the horror installation. Location because bathrooms tend to be small, with hard surfaces everywhere and floors slippery.
"Personally, I feel that the effectiveness of the horror panic depends on the protagonist's sense of security in any given situation. When threatened, all species take for granted the protection of all aspects of their bodies, not the rest of their anatomy Part of it. Organisms protect their genitals from damage to other body parts, otherwise they won't be able to reproduce offspring. Just like we protect our eyes, they are necessary to survive in the world. "
Allen believes that “getting around” is the root cause of the bathroom panic, and this is exactly the way we violate social rules and customs, otherwise we would know and understand them.
He added: "With this in mind, the toilet has a traditional tradition of vulnerability—reproductive organs are exposed, so being attacked there is particularly effective; it should be a safe place. Second, we spent years doing Training in the toilet and no sense of humor left some scars on our minds.
"We don't like our sewage very much, and we want our bathrooms to be clean. Silent Hill clearly plays this theme by forcing characters into spaces that should be" safe and clean ".
We want our bathroom to be clean. Amen
In Silent Hill: Heavy Rain-Rain is a scary central theme, launched in 2012 and developed by the now-defunct Vatra Games, the latest major series. Therefore, the connection between the game and the horror of the bathroom plays a more organic role.
Like Akira Yamaoka, Downpour's chief designer Marek Berka said he doesn't often ask about the horror of toilets in the collection, but he suggests from personal experience to necessities and similarities to slaughterhouses and medical environments. Office, inspiring Downpour's outdoor activities.
"This is not a question I get asked often," Berka laughed at Skype. "For me, it heightened fears of things like slaughterhouses and hospitals. Many rooms are sterilized and slaughtered, operated and operated in these places. They have similar decorations, tiles, metal surfaces, porcelain accessories -Designed to easily remove waste, blood and everything.
"If your environment is dirty, this can get worse, and it can become even more scary, because it looks like the settings have been used for some reason, maybe just before you get there.
"Based on my own experience, I was five and six in the hospital when I was six years old, and I had considerable surgery. At the time, these types of environments stirred up my fear of a sterile environment, even though I was an adult This fear has been overcome afterwards, but I think the underlying fear is related to many of us.
"In pouring rain, the main theme is water and rain itself, and many of the worst things happen in rain, and this runs through the game. So, most of Otherworld is affected by water. In turn, we naturally want to choose A water environment that naturally exists. "
P.T.'s decision was, of course, unnatural, because it decided to put a living fetus in a seemingly sterile and bug-ridden bathroom, seemingly suffering. PT, of course, is the predecessor of Kojima Productions 'Silent Hills' "bad playable trailer", whose ghostly rival Lisa has haunted the first person from start to finish Perspective players-especially toilets in distorted houses.
Amateur game hacker Lance McDonald has explored in recent months and made public the outstanding work done on previously unseen corners and gaps in the demo (seriously, Lance's work is top quality and time consuming, if you Yes, check out his Patreon. What he does), so I really want him to share his curious obsession with the horror series and the toilet.
McDonald told me: "So this is a summary of my understanding of the horror of the bathroom from a Japanese perspective, how Silent Hill takes advantage of this, and how it applies specifically to certain situations in the series," McDonald told me . "The bathroom is a connected place. The connection between the good cleanliness of our world and a dark, nasty, invisible place below. A sense of uneasiness is that something may come from another place and from It came out of the hole in the room. If we were too close, maybe we would be pulled there.
"In an abandoned building, the bathroom will be the first place where horrors begin to emerge and take over. Keep the door closed and don't listen too close, or you might hear something terrible. Is anyone here? PT's The bathroom played a great role in strengthening the sense of fear around the room. Someone knocked on the door from the inside, and then it suddenly sounded loudly. The door opened a little, and if we look inside, something is moving in the sink, but someone is fast The door was closed. The door closed suddenly and we were locked there.
"The monster in the sink is crying and someone is trying to enter. In the corridor, someone drilled a hole in the bathroom wall and the door was locked, but we can peer inside. Someone was murdered there and we still barely see What's going on in the sink.
"Overall, when we first met Eddie Dombrowski in Silent Hill 2, he was vomiting in the toilet. He was absolutely evil, which reminded us of whether he was somehow Way to connect with that place? Strange things happened in the bathroom, and when we entered Midwich Elementary School in the first game, we later appeared on another floor of the building.
"Silent Hill is a series about holes. The hole in the bathroom is absolutely terrible. Something terrible happened in the bathroom of P.T., maybe someone is too close to the other side."
I am now convinced that this happened in real life. As a former plumber, I am too close to the other party. Those years ago, I lost a little soul in that Glasgow toilet. That and my favorite screwdriver.
