Editorials
Let’s Revisit Akira Yamaoka’s Score For ‘Silent Hill 1’
I remember playing the first Silent Hill game very clearly. I remember the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and refusing to come down. I remember handing the controller to my friend to watch him play a bit and the second the controller left my hand I grabbed a baseball bat because I was so afraid of whatever was beyond my peripheral vision. I knew there wasn’t anything there. But that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was being watched, no…hunted from just beyond the shadows of my darkest imagination.
With this being Silent Hill Week on Bloody-Disgusting in honor of the 15th anniversary of Silent Hill, I wanted to focus on my love of the game’s soundtrack, composed by the wildly inventive and ever fascinating Akira Yamaoka.
Now, I know that I’ve written a retro review of the Silent Hill 1 soundtrack (which you can read here). But this article isn’t a review. It’s a visit to an old friend. It’s me heading back into the fog and the rust to appreciate the phantasmagorical beauty that only a town like Silent Hill could offer. Please, join me if you dare.
There is something about Silent Hill that has always been irresistible for me. I don’t know if it’s the importance of creating and sustaining a psychological terror versus the empty, hollow satisfaction of a “jump scare”. I don’t know if it’s the characters, who feel a bit more real, a bit more raw, and who feel like they are grounded in reality, even if the world around them is crumbling away into insanity.
I just kept getting drawn into the world of Silent Hill, over and over again, craving it, needing it. It was as though it became a way for me to face my own twisted form of introspection. My need to play these games was like each character’s need to push forward and endure their individualized punishment to attain some semblance of redemption or absolution.
And yet it is not the game I’m here to wax poetic on, it is the music. You see, for some reason the music of Silent Hill 1 was just as instrumental to me as the story of Harry desperately searching for his daughter, Cheryl. I came back to the game repeatedly because the sound of the game was what hypnotized me into entering that foggy town, time after time.
Yamaoka’s music is not just the music of the game, it is the voice of Silent Hill itself. The metal grates are the vocal cords, the rotten hallways the bronchial tree, the streets the lungs… The music was the sibilant whisper that drove Harry further and further into the darkness. It was the piercing shriek that soared over his head, desperately trying to claw off his skin. It was the throbbing, pulsating heart the burned underneath the town, exhaling fog and ash only to have it settle down upon its cracked, aged body.
Never before had I encountered a medium that so intricately wove the aural into the visual. What was once background music that aimed to get stuck in my head was now an integral part of the story. It breathed with me. It screamed with me. It whispered seductively in my ear, its filthy, rusty nails scraping their way up my spine. And I relished every fucking second.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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