I have a problem. You see, I am one of the thousands of gamers in love with the atmospheric and sometimes horrifying world of Silent Hill. It all started when I picked up a copy of The Room, played it and kept thinking ‘ wtf is this?’ It was the first survival horror game I played ( I mainly rolled old school and stuck with Secret of Mana). From that point forward, my intrigue with the series has grown, and I keep searching for games with similar themes ( ahem death), from Clock Tower to Eternal Darkness.
The world of horror has always shaped my writing, but since having played all the Silent Hill games, now I am constantly on the look out for Silent Hillish stuff: rusty buildings, ethereal environments, empty places begging to be explored, men with pyramids for heads ( OK, the last I have yet to find…dammit). I keep seeing things everywhere that make me want to put on some Akira Yamaoka goodness and just wait to see what happens. Or, at least photograph it.
One of the coolest hotels I’ve stayed at was right out of SH 3. Located in Geumchon, South Korea, the M Hotel seems rather drab on the outside. On the inside another picture is painted. Each floor has a strange theme, mostly industrial, although one looked like it was part of Rule of Rose, complete with chalkboards for walls. Near the elevator, these chain-mail lights greet visitors, and the floor looks like it was moving half the time. Funny enough, this hotel mainly caters to businessman (there was a lot of porn on TV). I wonder if the designer was a gamer……hmmmm.
I think this happens to a lot of us geeks, where the world in which we play begins to emulate the world in which we live. Or is it the other way around? I’m not sure now. Either way, I know I like my little Silent Hill encounters in real life just as much as I do when I am wielding a shotgun and running into fog.
The movie version of the town of Silent Hill was based on the real-life ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. In the 1950’s, the town unknowingly ignited a hard coal seam while burning trash. Coal seam fires can burn underground for hundreds of years, and by the 1970’s, the fire was burning underneath the town, putting its residents in danger from carbon monoxide poisoning as coal smoke seeped from cracks in the ground. The state of Pennsylvania eventually put the town under eminent domain, evacuated the town save for a few older residents who simply refused to leave, and then razed most of the town to the ground with the exception of a few public buildings. However, the site is a tourist attraction even though the state has huge signs posted warning of the dangers of C2O poisoning and that the ground could collapse into a burning hole at any moment.
I had a friend who visited it, and have seen pics myself. Incredible looking place with a tragic past.