Editorials
The Making of ‘Siren’: How Silent Hill’s Creator Redesigned Survival Horror
After creating and directing Silent Hill, one of the most ground-breaking, iconic and disturbing horror titles in gaming history, you would think that the last genre developer Keiichiro Toyama would make his directorial follow-up with would be survival horror. However, though that kind of thinking may be perfectly fine for many other developers, it wasn’t for Toyama. In fact, Toyama followed Silent Hill up with what is arguably not only a better game, but also one that presents a horror location far more sinister and unnerving than the foggy streets of Silent Hill could ever hope to be.
The game was the 2003 Playstation 2 horror masterpiece Siren.
Siren (known as Forbidden Siren in PAL territories) is set in the rural Japanese town of Hanuda, a place that is largely segregated from the rest of the world, thanks to the rabid zealots who reside within its boundaries. After an earthquake devastates the region and replaces the surrounding area with an eerie, endless red sea, villagers consumed by the red sea begin to turn into possessed beings, hellbent on creating a physical form for the reawakening of an ancient god. These possessed individuals are called Shibito, and they roam Hanuda in an almost zombie-like state, moaning, grunting, carrying out meaningless tasks from their former lives and babbling as they seek out any non-Shibito to murder. The player, taking control of 10 survivors over the course of the game, must escape the town before they themselves become mindless Shibito. The story, which plays out episodically, takes twists and turns at various points, and ultimately reveals a conclusion that is both satisfying and shocking. Toyama explains his take on how he unravelled the story in saying, “If you undo the tight and tangled balls of yarn in various places, you will eventually discover that it is all just one taught strand; the moment of catharsis. That was how I explained it to the team when we discussed story development.”
Before Toyama began work on Siren, his departure from Konami wasn’t as smooth as he would have hoped. Speaking about this he says, “Silent Hill set a bold new standard, and I am proud of what we accomplished, but I was under a lot of pressure in my position, and my lack of experience led to a lot of issues as I managed the team. To be frank, I lost confidence in my ability to direct. In order to make a fresh start, I joined SCE (now SIE) to work as an artist in an entirely unrelated genre. It was there that I gained the experience I needed and had the chance to learn how to lead a team naturally. Even as I was working in a different genre, I was stocking up new horror ideas, so when the time came for me to take on the directorship of a title once again, I chose to make a horror title”.
One of the characters you play as in Siren. It had originally been planned for Siren to feature 100 different playable characters.
At the heart of Siren is Hanuda, the rural village in which the game takes place. From the rundown wooden buildings across the town that show signs of regular lives that have suddenly been interrupted by some otherworldly calling, the various vehicles and activities that have been creepily abandoned when the villagers became Shibito, to the Silent Hill-like air raid siren that can be heard reverberating across the secluded region, the intense and bleak atmosphere of Hanuda is palpable and unmatched. Whereas Silent Hill is more of a ghost town of sorts, Hanuda is still inhabited, but the people who dwell there now are merely vacant lots for some malevolent almost Lovecraftian force. Though it almost sounds like a cliché you’ve read in almost every video game article since the medium existed, the town of Hanuda in Siren truly is a character unto itself. Toyama, born in the country himself, aimed to recreate the kind of terror “only a child can feel” by placing the player in such a secluded location.
Much like Hanuda, the large cast of Siren also takes center stage. Originally planned to allow the player take control of over 100 different villagers (yes, you read that right), Toyama cut down that number quite significantly in order to tighten up the story he was trying to tell. He explains, “We think 10 was a good balance. This gave the gameplay a lot of variety, including a stage where you play as a little girl who can do nothing but run and hide. We also did some things with our characters impossible in ordinary games – some of them drop out of the story completely, while others come back as villains. I think the narrative impact these moments have is one of our biggest successes”. The characters are for the most part normal people thrown into an unthinkable situation, and Siren does a wonderful job of giving this ensemble cast a heart. Additionally, a piece of their humanity is further achieved by using photographs of actors faces applied directly to their character models, a visual choice that not many games have opted for, particularly before Siren came along. This unusual effect comes across as unsettling at first, but soon it helps pull the player into the experience and, where possible, helps ground an impossible story within the realm of possibility.
Another aspect of Siren that helped it stand out among other titles in the overcrowded genre was the Sight Jack system. Sight Jacking essentially allows the player to switch their POV to that of a nearby Shibuto. This POV is unsteady as it perfectly follows the shaky and tormented movements of a Shibito and this, alongside the sound of their laboured breathing, garbled chatter and shrieking cries, makes for one hell of an unnerving experience. This POV is best used to survey the area for tactical advantage in terms of safely moving forward, as despite Siren offering the player a few different weapons for self-defence, Shibito are best avoided completely when possible. What’s more is that if the player is spotted by a Shibito, it is not uncommon for the screen to suddenly cut to the POV of the Shibito who is now in direct pursuit. These moments make for sudden scares that the likes of Silent Hill and Resident Evil could never even come close to. Toyama touches on the implementation of the Sight Jack system and says, “Among the ideas I had, one was taking pitched submarine battles, reliant on sonar, and replacing the sonar with something visual. It added originality to the gameplay, and it also allowed players to know something terrifying was approaching without letting them see it clearly. We thought that was particularly suited to the horror genre, so we used it in Siren. It became a symbol of the curse shared by the villagers, so it worked well with and added depth to the story”.
However, with the revolutionary system came issues in terms of achieving it. Toyama continues, “We faced a technical issue with the system. To maintain Sight Jack consistency, we had to retain every single Shibito and environmental effect in memory and track their movements, even if they were entirely in the background and unable to be seen. This restriction posed a huge problem for the technology of the time. But I was lucky to have a team of young staff who took a very positive attitude toward trying new things. So we had the benefit of a lot of momentum from considering and then resolving each issue.”
The Shibito come in some truly disturbing forms, including these Spider Shibito
Siren took inspiration from several different sources, from novels such as Battle Royale and the Shinki series, the Manga artistry of Junji Ito, Daijiro Morohoshi and Ryoko Yamagishi to photographs by Paul F. McCarthy directly influencing the design of the Shibuto. However, the main well of inspiration for the project was Insumasu o ouu Kage, a 1992 TV Japanese TV adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth. In terms of real-world inspiration however, Toyama was inspired by the so-called “Hidden Christians” who lived in the Kyushu region of Japan, while he also drew from the Tsuyasma Massacre, a killing spree in 1938 which saw 21-year old Mutsuo mercilessly murder half of his entire village with the aid of an axe, shotgun and katana.
Backing up the chilling setting, disturbing imagery and bleak atmosphere in Siren is a truly incredible soundtrack by Hitomi Shimizu. Keyboardist and composer Shimizu typically focuses on live-action and animation for her work, as well as being part of the musical duo Syzygys, but she has composed on Siren and Siren: Blood Curse, which was the 2008 reimagining of the original Siren game. Her work here is impeccable as her composition becomes something that is more in the “soundscape” territory than typical “soundtrack”. From strange chanting, otherworldly howls, swooping winds, distant noises and the churning of machines to audio that sounds like garbled transmissions from a different reality, Shimizu’s work intrinsically binds itself to the very fabric of Siren itself. Incredible.
As of 2018 Siren is 15 years old. The game spawned a sequel, a remake, a live-action film adaptation, and an upcoming manga series. But despite each new piece of the Siren franchise expanding and building upon the horror of the original, the first game still stands apart from everything else. After Toyama revolutionized the survival horror genre with Silent Hill, he positively perfected it with Siren. Toyama remarks about how Siren is currently being received in saying, “We recently held an event to celebrate the 15th anniversary and I was shocked to see so many new fans, even more than the initial launch. Two aspects of the game, the blurring between reality and fantasy and the timeline being revealed from the beginning, are incredibly well-suited to the culture of Let’s Play videos and Twitter that has emerged in the past 15 years. The title has become a shared experience that is passed onward. This makes me incredibly happy, and I can’t wait to see how the community will grow and change from here.”
The Sight Jack helps you pinpoint a Shibito’s location, but also means you get the horror of seeing them see you.
Since Siren: Blood Curse, Toyama has moved onto directing the Gravity Rush franchise, but perhaps one day he will return to his survival horror roots. However, who’s to say that when he does instead of merely giving us Siren 3 he decides to hit the restart button entirely. Regardless of what the future holds for the franchise, Siren is a classic that gamers who passed it by upon release should consider giving it a chance now.
Finally, when asked if Toyama would change anything about Siren he simply says, “Maybe an overhaul of the controls, especially the shooting sections… But I actually feel like players nowadays have a fondness for those not-exactly-polished parts of the game. So maybe we shouldn’t change anything at all…”.
Indeed. Nothing at all.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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