If Silent Hill 4 was a good game, it would have been an abstract masterpiece.

My relationship with the horror genre strays much earlier than I perhaps would have liked. A young child petrified as I’m exposed to Pennywise, Freddy Kruger and Jason. As a family, we would spend many a night curled up on our sofa gazing at VHS tapes of grizzly tales with curtains tight and my head beneath a thin cotton blanket. I developed a ritual to gaze at the televisions “on” switch rather than the action within frame. In this, I could seem as though I braved the monsters within, whilst subtly looking away. Within each subgenre, I seldom felt more of a swell in my gut than I did during stories which entailed the presence of ghosts. I recall vehemently recommending “13 Ghosts” on the playground of my school whilst my friends recommended “Jeepers Creepers” – I was far from brave enough to watch the latter. Nothing, however, unsettled me more so than my father’s return from ‘Game Shops’ with a particular franchise ensnared within his grip. A franchise I would eventual begin to respect in my childhood mind as the pinnacle of fright. One which, in the second instalment, I couldn’t even leave the opening room without flicking the switch to my PS2 in fright. This: Silent Hill.

I have two core memories with the franchise which stand tall above the rest. Yes, I vividly recall my father traversing Woodside Apartments in 2, and the School in the first. Yet two others linger above anything else. The shopping mall segment of ‘3’ and the entirety of ‘4’. For now, let’s leave the ‘shopping mall’ for another day. No doubt I will find the urge to discuss the franchise several times over in my lifetime, and let’s simply focus on the significance of 4. As is common knowledge amongst veterans of the series, the fourth installment is often considered the ‘black sheep’ of the franchise. Of course, if we disregard the Western entries alike Homecoming and Downpour. Such a concencous is certainly earned, and one would be a fool to suggest it is the most technically sound of the series. However, I ask the reader to momentarily disregard, if you please, the characteristics which define 4 as a ‘bad game’. Ignore the haphazard combat, or the farcical item management. Even the escort mission trope which plagues its second half, and departure from truly wondering the streets of Silent Hill. Simply, call attention to the atmosphere.

Silent Hill 4, in my opinion, is truly a masterclass in uncanny horror. Where its predecessors walked, the fourth installment ran. Yes, of course, the scares were less so defined and iconic as the hospital rooftop of 2 or the mirror room of 3. Silent Hill’s fourth installment feels like picking at a sore with jagged fingernails. The process is slower acting and irritating in some way, but the wound scars just as deep.

I realised, when watching my father creep through the game, that something was inherently wrong about Silent Hill 4. More so than the rest, this instalment felt incorrect. At its very core, lone in its tone. It felt eerie to merely curl my eyes in the direction of that fat backed heavy set television, and each inch of the frame, which dwarfed my own, felt murky. It was unsettling. In many ways, it provided the same tone as that murky Silent Hill 2 opening bathroom and abandoned apartments – only stretched and contorted into one extended experience.

Silent Hill 4, in tone, feels like placing two undersized shoes on opposing feet then embarking upon a grueling ten mile hike. It’s uncomfortable, and certainly unenjoyable, but the level of discomfort is something this horror writer cannot help but admire. These scares aren’t cheap, as we come to expect from this franchise’s early installments. They’re the definition of bare-bones psychological horror. They contort our perception and leave us as uneasy as we are unsettled. For my childhood mind, with an imagination that ran far behind that of my limited adulthood, even the ‘hub world’ apartment felt uncanny. To merely wonder in those first-person sequences and inspect one’s surrounded seemed obtuse. Then we reach the bathroom. A bathroom with a hole firmly implanted into the centre of one of its four walls. Within this hole, we see nothing but sheer darkness and we are compelled to scramble within. Like Junji- Ito’s “The Enigma Of Amigara Fault”, we simply clamber inside the hole. It’s, as previously stated, wrong. It gently tinkers with our rules of logic. These holes do not exist, we know this as fact, but to be transported to other worlds within them? Other locations, other places which we surely could not lead from our bathroom, we feel nudged onto our heels. Grotty subways, water prisons or forests. Each reachable through this hole implanted in our bathroom wall feels remarkably unsettling. Our homes, particularly our bathrooms, are our safe haven. Yet, in this apartment, we are trapped within and forced to escape through this bizarre crevice within our walls. The critically acclaimed Silent Hill 2 plays with our logic in a similar manner through the ‘Historical Society’ level. Admittedly, this sequence is far more refined and seems more sure in its approach, yet we cannot help but draw parallels. In 2, we plunge into several holes in the ground merely to progress, and happen upon a prison, then execution chambers and hanging bodies. We feel as though we’re plummeting into something which is beyond our logic. Somewhere that we should not be. Much like the entirety of 4’s dream worlds. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the deepest we stray into the uncanny in 2 beholds the grave of Walter Sullivan, the antagonist of 4. Whilst 4 matches the dirtiness of 2’s bathroom and apartments. It spiritually attempts to capture the absurdity of 2’s historical society. Of course, this is likely where the comparisons between these two end. James Sunderland’s story in 2 is a tragic discussion of repressed trauma, whilst 4 is less philosophical.

Then the monsters. Characteristic for any Silent Hill story, the monsters can make or break the immersion of your installment. We see, in Downpour, the sheer misstep in bland monster design which certainly is to the detriment of the final product. So how does 4 fair? We shall simply remark that my childhood nightmares were plagued with the ghosts of this lonely tale. With these empty vessel corpses floating as though an entity drags and yanks them through air. Bodies which, at times, we have met. Now sad empty sacks which float toward us with sunken heads. Ghosts burrowed into walls, trapped by the waist. Or the twin victims. Deformed heads floating in rags with over enlarged hands that point upon greeting you. Their backstory is as horrific as their appearance. The manifestation of Walter Sullivan’s 7th and 8th victims, their fate is just as cruel as the town itself.

Silent Hill 4 feels like stepping into another person’s dream. Of course, quite literally when considering the true narrative of the entry. Whilst offered the general characteristics of a typical nightmarish Silent Hill world, in 4 we’re revealed an angle which knocks us off-kilter. We’re provided deceptions of logic so peculiar we cannot help but feel our skin turn inside out. The game, such a shame considering all else, is theoretically sound in its approach to horror. The angle it decides upon is quite beautiful in how unique it may be. Even the before menu intro separates itself from other series entries. It’s quiet. Subdued. Riddled with noises we cannot pinpoint and murky snippets of the environments and monsters we will soon be engaging. Until, suddenly, it transitions from a ‘thing’ scrambling toward screen into a blank faced Walter Sullivan gazing blankly upon us. It is quiet, unassuming, yet upon watching we cannot help but feel a staggering desire to scratch our skin clean. It feels otherworldly, it feels like a nightmare.

In the second book of my first horror novel series “The Coldest Corners Of A Stolen Soul” I vividly describe a seeming fever dream with general suggestions of reality sprinkled between. It’s true that, upon the finished product, the chapter resembled nothing alike Silent Hill 4; I still looked to the game as inspiration for this sequence. I looked to the prior mentioned intro scene, or subtly of the bear on the bed with its bloodied mouth. I looked to the water prison and its deception of logic. I looked to the transition of climbing the hole to resting on the downwards escalator riding into nothing. I realised, whilst researching, that to truly detail a nightmare we need to gently rock the reader in the wrong direction.

Sub-textually, it would be foolish to suggest this installment carries the same weight as other early entries. From the allegory to coming of age in 3 or the exploration of trauma in 2, 4 seems quite infantile in its characterization. Henry Townsend is, I believe somewhat intentionally, quite the bland and empty character. He’s a loner, and 4 explores an approach which is quite literal in its exploration of these key themes. He’s a voyeur, now trapped within his small single bedroom apartment forced to observe the world beyond his residential prison. He peeps through windows, or holes in his wall. He’s quite a monotone, bland, gentleman which speaks to the general mundanity of his existence. He is, like the complaints regarding him, nothing special. Yet, here we are. Quite literally transported into his eyes as he silently wonders his apartment and peeps on others. Where the James Sunderland was the walking ghost of a lonely man which lost it all, Henry is the tragedy of loneliness in itself as an abstract concept. A tragedy in that he is the outcome of true adult emptiness. A danger which faces us all. To become just another empty vessel, like Henry, watching from our quiet sanctuaries at lives we deem far more interesting than our own. He is, I believe intentionally, a blank slate of a man. In his concrete prison he is no different, no more interesting, than the residence above or below him.

For sure, Silent Hill 4 is as missed an opportunity as much as it is a theoretical masterclass in abstract horror. The horror it provides feels more like a fevered dream than logical frights. To merely wander the rooms of this broken world, we realise that this Silent Hill provides the same uncertainty as travelling the dreams of another. Overlooking the clear faults of the game, of which there are many, we should not disregard the achievement of this fourth instalment in orchestrating an atmosphere which is truly nightmarish. Not so much within blatant frights, but the simple notion of traversing worlds we know are fundamentally false in their respect to logic. If anything, I feel Silent Hill’s fourth installment truly embraces the potential of its broken world and broken town, and strays as deep as the series has ever wandered along the uncanny valley.