Editorials
Exploring the Weird World of Cancelled ‘Silent Hill’ Games
Being a Silent Hill fan can be pretty rough. While fellow survival horror franchises like Resident Evil never stopped releasing sequels, remakes and adaptations, it’s been a decade since the last official Silent Hill game. And even then, most of the games released after the original Team Silent disbanded weren’t exactly masterpieces to begin with. There was a glimmer of hope back in 2014 with the surprise announcement of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills, but that project was cancelled faster than a series protagonist can chug down a Health Drink.
Fortunately for fans, Konami’s Silent Hill Transmission appears to indicate that the dog days are over, with a staggering four unique entries currently in development. While this is the best horror news I’ve heard all year, there’s always a risk that not all of these projects will make it to the finish line. After all, Konami has a history of mishandling their flagship horror franchise, and several interesting takes on the Silent Hill IP have been cancelled in the past.
So as we wait for the new entries in the series, I thought that this might be a good time to look back on the weird world of cancelled Silent Hill games to see if there are any compelling ideas that might be worth revisiting in the future. After all, those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it, and I think there’s plenty to learn from the foggy streets of that cursed town.
Obviously, we aren’t privy to everything that goes on at Konami, so there are likely more than a few cancelled entries that we’ve never heard about. That means this article is limited to projects that have been leaked by developers and Konami itself, though we’ll mostly be focusing on the ones that at least got past the conceptual stage.
We deserved so much more!
The earliest known cancelled Silent Hill title comes in the form of Team Silent’s Silent Hill 5, which was meant to be a standalone story in the vein of SH2. As revealed during interviews with series veterans Akihiro Imamura and Akira Yamaoka, this unfinished game supposedly contained the darkest narrative that the Team had ever come up with. There were even rumors that the protagonist was meant to recall the events of the story while being locked up in a psychiatric hospital.
Imamura also claimed that the Team wanted to try their hand at daylight horror, with the game featuring our first look at Silent Hill as a real town with ordinary citizens going about their business. During the course of the campaign, gamers would see the town slowly become corrupted by the encroaching Otherworld, with the director even citing films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jacob’s Ladder as major influences on development.
Unfortunately, Konami didn’t like the direction that the game was headed in and decided to disband Team Silent once and for all, shifting the development of the title to a western studio. This ultimately resulted in the underwhelming Silent Hill: Homecoming, which many claimed to be the beginning of the end for the franchise. That being said, a few elements of the cancelled game did make it into Homecoming, such as the dramatic Otherworld transitions (which were meant to capitalize on the PS3’s upgraded hardware) as well as several references to Jacob’s Ladder.
After the end of Team Silent, several western developers attempted to pitch their own Silent Hill games to Konami, usually with little to no success. Renegade Kid (known for Dementium) and WayForward Technologies (who later developed the controversial SH: Book of Memories) both tried to get SH games on the Nintendo DS, and Climax Studios pitched the ambitious Silent Hill: Cold Heart for the Wii.
There was a game here. It’s gone now.
While that last game would evolve into the underrated SH: Shattered Memories, Climax Studios had another interesting cancelled project in the form of Silent Hill: Original Sin. A portable precursor to what would eventually become SH: Origins, the game was meant to be an action-packed third-person shooter influenced by comedy shows like Scrubs. A sizable chunk of this bizarre title was completed before Climax shifted development to their UK studios, where the game was reworked into a more traditional prequel.
Original Sin was quite close to completion when it was transferred overseas, and Origins ended up re-using a lot of the game’s assets. While I’m curious about how the title intended to implement its horror-comedy and base-building elements, I think discarding these ideas in favor of a more traditional SH experience was the right move.
Another mysterious unmade project from this era is Silent Hill: The Box. Developed by Silicon Knights, the creators of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Blood Omen: The Legacy of Kain, this entry was meant to be an open world survival horror experience with a focus on exploration. While it’s unclear if Konami was ever actually involved with the game, Silicon Knights eventually managed to transfer the project to THQ, who rebranded the title as an original IP dubbed The Ritualyst.
Unfortunately, financial struggles at THQ resulted in the game never being finished despite years of secretive work. Since then, quite a few ambiguous screenshots from early stages of the game’s development have leaked online, but none of these show what gameplay would have been like. An interesting detail about this early material is that most of the images appear to have been rendered in Unreal Engine 3 despite Silicon Knights’ then-ongoing lawsuit against Epic Games.
What might have been…
After a few more years of aborted sequels like Masahiro Ito’s proposed follow-up to Downpour, which was meant to kill off Pyramid Head (Ito is quite vocal about his distaste for the character’s continued use after SH2), it seemed like Konami was finally getting their act together with the development of a then-rumored reboot involving Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito.
Naturally, I’m referring to the ill-fated Silent Hills, which has become something of a cautionary tale in the gaming industry. While not much is known about the inner workings of this unfinished title, Kojima made it clear that P.T. was meant to be more of an atmospheric mood piece than a literal representation of the finished game’s mechanics. From what little details can be gathered online, it appears that the team’s main goal was to focus on abject terror instead of Survival Horror as an established genre, with several rumors indicating that the game would rely on creepy gimmicks and online functionality to personalize its scares.
It’s also clear that the game was supposed to be more cinematic than previous outings in the series, with Guillermo del Toro going even comparing some of the game’s qualities with The Last of Us, going so far as to note that it made no sense that such a remarkable game wasn’t going to be completed after so much work had gone into it.
Fortunately, the development time wasn’t completely wasted, as several concepts from the cancelled game would later show up again in Death Stranding, and P.T. wound up inspiring a whole generation of indie horror titles. That being said, it’s still a shame that the greatest living auteur in the industry never got to show us his unique vision for the series, though I’m glad that Konami appears to be embracing several different voices with their new announcements.
After all, Silent Hill has always worked best as an anthological series, with each entry exploring a completely different facet of the franchise. So if at least a couple of these newly announced games make it to their release dates, I know I’ll be there waiting for them in the fog with my trusty flashlight and radio.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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