Your mileage may vary, but from where we’re standing, 2006’s Silent Hill is one of the more successful video game adaptations. Christophe Gans’ film ports over a great deal of that franchise’s nightmare logic, surrealism, and sinister foreboding while also maintaining the horrifying creature designs that made those games such a skin-crawling experience to play through. Also, it has Pyramid Head in it. Imagine not liking a movie with a character named Pyramid Head in it. Couldn’t be us.
Anyway, Silent Hill was followed six years later by a sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation, which was … well, quite frankly, it wasn’t great (yes, even though it, too, had a Pyramid Head). Maybe not even good. Again, your mileage will vary here! This is a very divisive series! But that’s not what’s important right now. What’s important right now is, Christophe Gans has returned to the franchise with the aptly-named Return to Silent Hill, Pyramid Head is back, and today we’re getting our first look at him. There he is, in all his pyramid-headed glory, up at the top of this page.
Here it is again, in case you don’t want to scroll up:
That’s our boy, alright. Pyramid firmly affixed to broad shoulders. Flesh scratched and torn. Hell, he’s even standing near a rusted iron gate of some sort, which is an extremely Silent Hill thing for Pyramid Head to be doing (we would also have accepted “Pyramid Head near a chain link fence” or “Pyramid Head with giant-ass sword”). It’s good news that Gans has returned to the franchise, and doubly-good news that we can rest assured that our ol’ pal Pyramid Head is along for the ride. Just imagine going to see Return to Silent Hill and discovering that it does not contain a Pyramid Head. You’d be furious!
Anyhow, this first look comes to us today via Variety, who debuted the image earlier this morning. Their report specifically mentions that Return to Silent Hill will be based on Silent Hill 2 (the game, that is), and offer up the following plot description:
“Jeremy Irvine stars in the film as James, a man broken after his relationship with the love of his life, Mary (Hannah Emily Anderson), ends. According to its official synopsis, the action kicks off ‘when a mysterious letter from her calls him back to Silent Hill, he finds a once-recognizable town transformed by an unknown evil. While James desperately searches for Mary, he encounters terrifying creatures and begins to unravel the mystery of what happened to the town. But as he descends deeper into the darkness the secrets he uncovers lead to a horrifying truth, and James finds himself struggling to hold on long enough to save his one true love.'”
As we’ve seen before, the world of Silent Hill is a tricky one to translate to film. Doing so means delivering a parade of memorable and unique creature designs, accurately capturing the game’s dreamlike/nightmarish tone (a thing that is very, very easy to overdo), and giving us a protagonist whose character motivations might reasonably explain why they’d go fucking around in the town of Silent Hill in the first place. That’s quite the needle to thread and, as we’ve seen, it’s only been pulled off (for the most part!) once. Will Gans be able to do it again? We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
Nothing further to report on Return to Silent Hill at this time, but hopefully we’ll be hearing more about its release timeline soon (Variety’s report does inform us that a rough cut of the film recently screened, which seems to suggest we’ll be getting an update on the release date front sooner rather than later). Stay tuned for further updates as they roll in, Pyramid Head stans.
