INNOCUOUS SETTINGS IN HORROR GAMES

Ordinary places made extraordinarily Scary

- Jody Macgregor

Some horror games are set in spooky castles, abandoned mental asylums, derelict spaceships, or circuses with an unwise hiring policy regarding murder clowns. Others are set in suburban streets, shopping malls, hospitals, schools, or homes. I find the second kind have the most impact, haunting my thoughts long after they’re over like a picture I shouldn’t have looked at on the internet.

The Silent Hill games are especially good at this, and have made me feel even more ambivalent about hospitals than I already did. Hospitals are already stressful places, but Silent Hill 2 takes in apartment buildings, a nightclub, a historical society and even a bowling alley, all of which it imbues with terror. A brief scene in a cemetery turns out to be a rare moment of safety. Though eventually Silent Hill 2 descends into a dark prison, its horrifying finale is saved for a holiday resort on a lake.

The scariest things in Silent Hill 2 are accentuated by the ordinariness of their backdrop. We anticipate creepy stuff in gothic mansions, that’s the whole point of them, but the worst thing you expect to encounter in a bowling alley is a 7-10 split. Silent Hill takes innocuous places and peels their skin back until the walls bleed with rust and the floors flake away to reveal fragile chainlink over bottomless pits.