Editorials
In Defense Of ‘Silent Hill’ (2006)
Video game adaptations. You either love them, or you hate them. I’ve found myself on both sides, though I usually find myself siding with the latter. The reason for this is while there have been a few that have genuinely tried to be faithful to their source material, they’re lost in a sea of lazily crafted cash-grabs from people who aren’t willing to invest more than a modicum of effort into them.
These half-assed movies ignore the fact that gamers are an incredibly passionate bunch. Like some sort of geeky hive mind, we’ve spent years amassing our knowledge, holding week-long celebrations, and building insanely detailed wikis that serve as virtual shrines to the things we love. We could use this hive mind mentality for evil, but we don’t.
Because there’s a good chance we know considerably more about these worlds than the folks adapting them, we can tell when the filmmakers haven’t even played the game they’re trying to turn into a movie. We can also tell when they have played them.
It’s alarming how rare that is. Turning a game into a movie without playing the game is like deciding to adapt The Lord of the Rings when your knowledge is limited to the six minutes you spent watching the 1978 animated flick. Don’t do that. Seriously, don’t. As fervent as gamers can sometimes get, the communities that surround Tolkien’s works are exponentially more intense.
They won’t hesitate to cut you, and they’ll do it with a genuine replica of a Greenleaf knife, probably while yelling in Elvish.
There’s really only a handful of video game franchises that have communities like that, and one of them is Silent Hill. This series has had 15 years to make us love it. For people like me, who have been playing these games since the first released in 1999, that love is unconditional. The first three games guaranteed its status as one of gaming’s greats early on.
Christophe Gans is a fan of Silent Hill, and it shows. Before he was able to direct the adaptation, Gans hounded Konami for five years before he was given the film rights, even going so far as to send them an audition tape to explain his love for the series.
There’s a number of reasons why I consider this film to be the most successful of Hollywood’s many attempts at bringing a video game to the silver screen, but among them, keeping Konami Japan and Team Silent — the team behind the first four games — involved with its production the whole way through is what kept it from becoming just another video game movie.
With a fan in the director’s chair and consistent input from the developer, Silent Hill was able to retain much of what made the games so memorable. Akira Yamaoka’s work on the games’ soundtracks is iconic, so pulling a selection of tracks from the early games was smart. That move went a long way in making the film feel like it was an extension of the games.
You don’t need to spend any significant amount of time with the games to be familiar with their very distinct atmosphere. Silent Hill has a very unique aesthetic. The world is opaque and dreamlike, it feels like a living thing. It shifts and changes based on your darkest fears, secrets and sins. It’s a very personal nightmare.
It’s not surprising that some of this was lost in translation. It makes sense that Gans and Co. would want to use familiar creatures from the series, like Pyramid Head and the Nurses — originally manifestations of James Sunderland’s psyche — rather than try and come up with something new. Revelations would later take a stab at being original, and we all saw how that turned out.
Clive Barker called. He wanted me to tell you you’re bad at this.
The film’s cast of monsters serve as a sort of highlight reel. Fan favorites like the Grey Children, Bobble Head Nurses, Lying Figure and Pyramid Head make their necessary appearances, and while I would’ve liked to see them tied to Rose, seeing them realized outside of the games with such an impressive attention to detail made up for that unrealized narrative potential.
That’s not to say the movie didn’t try anything new. That old-timey flashback bit near the end was beautiful and did a fantastic job of cleaning up the near-incoherent mess that was the film’s story.
We may have reached a point where there’s a dozen awful video game movies for every successful — relatively speaking — attempt, but it’s films like Silent Hill that keep me from developing an entirely pessimistic view of the popular trend. It’s far from perfect, but I believe Gans and Friends have come the closest to bringing us a decent adaptation.
How about you? Feel free to share your thoughts on this movie, or even video game adaptations in general, in the comments!
It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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