I'm not a big horror fan these days. I was during my 20s but I've lost the nerve for them. But oh what memories I have! I was sucked into Resident Evil like everyone else. Sure it made me jump, but it really doesn't take much to make people jump. My memories of Resident Evil and the fear it induced, more often than not, came more from running out of ammo and looking for a typewriter ribbon to save my progress. Sure it had some genuine scares here and there, but it wasn't until I visited a little fog shrouded town named Silent Hill that true horror grabbed me.
Silent Hill starts out unassuming enough. You're driving your jeep with your daughter down a country road, something appears in the road, you try to dodge it and skid off the road, bonk your head and go unconscious. My memory of the intro is fuzzy, so some of the details might be wrong, but I remember your character wakes up and his daughter is gone, so you wander into the town of Silent Hill looking for her.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":689321,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"gbunfiltered,","session":"A"}']We all know that the fog in the first Silent Hill game was used partly to work around the limitations of the hardware. But it was also a great character in and of itself. It may not have looked as pretty as it did in later installments, but it served its purpose in concealing what was out there and giving a very oppressive feel to the game. You were alone, your daughter was missing, you couldn't see much of anything around you, and some pretty effed up things were going on in that town. A stray howl or noise here and there was pretty much all you heard at first, but it was enough to freak you out (and did not at all prepare you for the horrors to come).
It was what happened near the end of this little introduction that terrified me the most. I don't remember much else about the game all these years later. But I do remember seeing a girl (who looked a lot like your character's daughter) in the distance, shrouded in fog, chasing her through the streeets and ending up in an alley and a dead end. Then suddenly a distant siren and the world around me starting to change into a hellish version of itself. As if that wasn't scary enough, the skinless, knife wielding children that come out of the fog and surround me was the icing on the bloody cake.
Later installments introduced us to Pyramid Head, the disgustingly proportioned corpse rapist, and the faceless nurses with their sick blend of horror and sexuality. And games in recent years have pushed the envelope of disturbing and disgusting content to new highs (or lows), and pushed the boundaries of good taste that Silent Hill started 12 years ago. But for me nothing quite captures those first few minutes in Silent Hill. It was the stuff of nightmares.