In 2000, my family and I visited our local Blockbuster. This time, 9-year-old Zack decided to rent the original Silent Hill for the PlayStation 1. The game wasn’t new at this point, and the PS1 was starting to show its age, but I was happy with the console and excited to play a new game. My mom was aware it was rated M, but I had played other T and M games before, so she let me rent Silent Hill. Later that day, I’d play what remains the scariest moment I’ve ever experienced in a video game. In hindsight, I wish she’d said no.
Before Silent Hill, I hadn’t really played a scary game. I’d played games that had moments that were scary or tense, but nothing that I would classify as horror or even horror-adjacent. I’d never played Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, or anything like that. Looking back, I can’t even tell you why I picked Silent Hill that day. I’d often just grab something that jumped out at me and that I hadn’t played before, as I desperately tried to play everything I could get my hands on.
“There are violent and disturbing images in this game.” That was the very first thing I saw when I booted up Silent Hill on my PS1. My younger brother was watching. Neither of us really understood what I had just put into the console. I remember thinking how odd it was that the game started with that warning. But I pushed through and was impressed by all the pre-rendered cutscene clips that make up the game’s intro video. Then I got control of Harry Mason, began moving around the foggy environment of Silent Hill, and started to realize that this wasn’t Crash Bandicoot or a Star Wars game. That never-ending drone in the background. The claustrophobic wall of fog. The eerie sound of Henry’s own footsteps. I started to feel nervous. Uneasy.
I eventually made my way to a gate, opened it, and found a mutilated, bloody corpse. Then an air raid siren played in the distance. I gripped my controller tighter. I pushed through the alleyway. It started off normal, but got more twisted and sinister. The fixed camera wobbled around, rattling me further. It also got darker, forcing Harry to pull out a small lighter to make his way through the darkness. The world was now rusty. The music grew more intense and loud. The camera wobbled and wiggled even more as I began to actually panic in real life. My brother left the room at this point. I kept going.
The alleyway turned into a corridor of nightmarish fencing and concrete. I was very, very scared. And then I reached the end and discovered more bloodied bodies and a corpse hung up on display. I turned Harry around. That’s when a few small, childlike creatures stumbled out of the shadows with knives and attacked.
I remember clearly screaming and mashing buttons. I didn’t realize this was a scripted moment where you had to take damage and pass out to continue. I tried to escape those things, but couldn’t. Eventually they caught me, and I felt my heart beating harder and louder than ever before.
I couldn’t focus on the cutscene that played after all of that, with Harry waking up in the diner and speaking to a police officer. Finally, when I got control of the game, I started cautiously exploring the diner, but when I went to leave, a giant bat-like monster crashed through the glass, and I decided, you know, what? I don’t think this game is for me. I turned it off and vowed to never play Silent Hill again.
Despite playing later games in the series and other horror titles like Resident Evil, I’ve stuck to that vow. I’ve never gone back and played the original Silent Hill. I expect I’ll return when the remake arrives in the future. While I expect it will have a similar intro, I can’t imagine it, or any other game, will ever scare me the way Silent Hill did 25+ years ago.
