“If you want to understand a place, ignore the boastful monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses,” writes Colin Dickey in Ghostland, his survey of haunted America. Ghost stories, he argues, uncover repressed memories. They tell an alternative history of a place, or a town, or a country; they build pain and sorrow and loss into their surroundings.
Blown out and distorted beyond recognition, like a punk track pushing into the red
Fiction follows suit. The “horror” in a horror story invariably bleeds into the spaces around the characters. Think of the immortal opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the house a tomb and its black contents sealed in tight. Or Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On films, where violent murders leave a permanent curse on a family’s home. Or even Kitty Horrorshow’s ANATOMY, which perverts the familiar logic of a suburban house into something hungry and willful. These haunted spaces prove so magnetic that writers invent absurd plot contrivances to force their occupants to stick around well after any real person would have turned tail and fled.
The Silent Hill games in particular have consistently externalized their psychology into grotesque, surreal environments; the psychosexual purgatory of Silent Hill 2 is like a theme park constructed with the express purpose of shaming its protagonist.
But the lurid, leering descent of Silent Hill 3 is unique in its gendered discomfort. It is about 17-year-old Heather Mason gradually realizing that she has carried the dormant fetus of God within her all her life. The specifics here—which God? How was Heather impregnated?—are secondary to the intimate body horror of the situation.
At the top of the Central Square Shopping Mall, there is a door. This door, the Red Crescent Door, is covered in scabrous black mould and a feverish red script, set into a sunken, pockmarked frame, as if being pushed into the swollen underbelly of some massive decomposing corpse. The surrounding walls, too, are pitted and running with veins of rancid mildew and rot. The crescent itself is gouged deep into the door’s surface; red plays at the edges of its dark arc like infection flaring around a wound.
To open the door, Heather uses a small pearlescent moonstone. Commonly, the anatomical structure of the hymen in prepubescence is that of a crescent; the moonstone alludes to the menstrual cycle. In a final, superlatively loaded bit of imagery, Heather must transgress this fleshy, feminized boundary to fight the game’s first boss: a large mauve worm both phallic and fetal at once. This is the entire conceit of the game bound into a handful of symbolic actions. The rest of the game only gets more explicit: to confront the prematurely born God at the game’s climax, Heather must descend through a torn, bloody hole in the obvious shape of a vagina.
This expressionism evokes Carol’s apartment in Roman Polanski’s sexual nightmare Repulsion, where groping masculine hands sprout from the walls and the rooms distort to impossible proportions, and the fecund derelict ship in Ridley Scott’s Alien, full of colossal yonic orifices and wet pulsing eggs. Horror games build worlds as baroque as the orphanages and airships of Rule of Rose or as simple as the hallway that comprises the entirety of PT, but their mandate is always to unsettle and dislocate the player at every opportunity.
It’s no stretch to extrapolate that as a teenage girl, Heather’s sexual autonomy is already bound and censured by the world around her. Silent Hill 3 literalizes this hysterical religious obsession with controlling women’s wombs: instead of fundamentalist Christians, it’s a Rosemary’s Baby-style cult. Heather is made a broodmare, her body used without her consent to gestate a God that will kill her in its birthing.
Heather’s sexual autonomy is already bound and censured by the world around her
Silent Hill 3 abandons the psychological frippery of its venerated predecessor to focus on meatier concerns. It is the apex of the series’ use of visual noise: textures are often blown out and distorted beyond recognition, like a punk track pushing into the red. Swarming film grain chokes the screen. The colors look tangibly sick; the pale white of a waterlogged corpse, the livid gold-maroon of dried blood. It’s this particular color that defines Silent Hill 3. It is the color of the game’s Otherworld, the place where reality fractures into madness; madness that is all too personal for Heather Mason.
“If you want to understand a place, ignore the boastful monuments and landmarks, and go straight to the haunted houses,” writes Colin Dickey in Ghostland, his survey of haunted America. Ghost stories, he argues, uncover repressed memories. They tell an alternative history of a place, or a town, or a country; they build pain and sorrow and loss into their surroundings.
Fiction follows suit. The “horror” in a horror story invariably bleeds into the spaces around the characters. Think of the immortal opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the house a tomb and its black contents sealed in tight. Or Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On films, where violent murders leave a permanent curse on a family’s home. Or even Kitty Horrorshow’s ANATOMY, which perverts the familiar logic of a suburban house into something hungry and willful. These haunted spaces prove so magnetic that writers invent absurd plot contrivances to force their occupants to stick around well after any real person would have turned tail and fled.
The Silent Hill games in particular have consistently externalized their psychology into grotesque, surreal environments; the psychosexual purgatory of Silent Hill 2 is like a theme park constructed with the express purpose of shaming its protagonist.
But the lurid, leering descent of Silent Hill 3 is unique in its gendered discomfort. It is about 17-year-old Heather Mason gradually realizing that she has carried the dormant fetus of God within her all her life. The specifics here—which God? How was Heather impregnated?—are secondary to the intimate body horror of the situation.
At the top of the Central Square Shopping Mall, there is a door. This door, the Red Crescent Door, is covered in scabrous black mould and a feverish red script, set into a sunken, pockmarked frame, as if being pushed into the swollen underbelly of some massive decomposing corpse. The surrounding walls, too, are pitted and running with veins of rancid mildew and rot. The crescent itself is gouged deep into the door’s surface; red plays at the edges of its dark arc like infection flaring around a wound.
To open the door, Heather uses a small pearlescent moonstone. Commonly, the anatomical structure of the hymen in prepubescence is that of a crescent; the moonstone alludes to the menstrual cycle. In a final, superlatively loaded bit of imagery, Heather must transgress this fleshy, feminized boundary to fight the game’s first boss: a large mauve worm both phallic and fetal at once. This is the entire conceit of the game bound into a handful of symbolic actions. The rest of the game only gets more explicit: to confront the prematurely born God at the game’s climax, Heather must descend through a torn, bloody hole in the obvious shape of a vagina.
This expressionism evokes Carol’s apartment in Roman Polanski’s sexual nightmare Repulsion, where groping masculine hands sprout from the walls and the rooms distort to impossible proportions, and the fecund derelict ship in Ridley Scott’s Alien, full of colossal yonic orifices and wet pulsing eggs. Horror games build worlds as baroque as the orphanages and airships of Rule of Rose or as simple as the hallway that comprises the entirety of PT, but their mandate is always to unsettle and dislocate the player at every opportunity.
It’s no stretch to extrapolate that as a teenage girl, Heather’s sexual autonomy is already bound and censured by the world around her. Silent Hill 3 literalizes this hysterical religious obsession with controlling women’s wombs: instead of fundamentalist Christians, it’s a Rosemary’s Baby-style cult. Heather is made a broodmare, her body used without her consent to gestate a God that will kill her in its birthing.
Silent Hill 3 abandons the psychological frippery of its venerated predecessor to focus on meatier concerns. It is the apex of the series’ use of visual noise: textures are often blown out and distorted beyond recognition, like a punk track pushing into the red. Swarming film grain chokes the screen. The colors look tangibly sick; the pale white of a waterlogged corpse, the livid gold-maroon of dried blood. It’s this particular color that defines Silent Hill 3. It is the color of the game’s Otherworld, the place where reality fractures into madness; madness that is all too personal for Heather Mason.
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