not_that_kind_of_guy wrote:
could anyone indulge me by explaining the plot though? i didn’t have a fucking clue by the end of it.
OK… spoilers (for the film and the game) and pretentious, obsessive analysis coming up.
The town of Silent Hill was origionally settled in by pagans many years before the film was set. There worshipped a demon (whose name has been lost to the ages) and there were also sub-demons. The one snag is, that the cult were absolutly right, and the demon was in fact God (well, not in a neolithic sense, but stick with me). When the Christians came, their beleifs worked their way into those of the cult and it became an entangement of theological beleifs- the demon became simply ‘God’ or ‘The Holy Mother’, the sub-demons became Angels (in the eyes of the cult). The purer members of the cult, less influenced by christianity became the victims of the witch-hunts that were rampant in America at the time, and as you saw in the film, very little had changed by modern times, where those failing to abide by the cult’s rules were burned as witches. The God, however was still with them, and in different times used the emotions of one of the townspeople to facilitate it’s arrival into the human realm. It used that persons emotions to nuture itself and would then be born into the world of mankind, ushering in a new dawn for all of humanity. Now, this plot doesn’t work, because it is a misinterpretation of the plot of the silent hill games. In the film, there is no reason for Sharon to exist, and basicly everything that happens in the film has bugger all to do with the main plot.
In the games, the cult took on a much different role. Dahlia was the leader of the cult of Samael. The demon takes the emotional content of the person that it is being birthed through; the cult wish for the destruction of mankind (“the begining… the birth of paradise despioled by mankind”- Claudia, Dahlia’s daughter) and so wish for the God to be a Demon of hatred and mass destructive force, hence they give it the name Samael (an old fashioned name for Satan). For this, they need the person who will birth Samael to also be full of hatred, pain and suffering.
In order for a person to birth God, the ritual of the Holy Assumption is used (bringing the God into the person; this is one of the steps. There are three steps, or ‘cycles’ in all. The Holy Assumption brings the God into the person, the second releses the person from their human body and creates a new world based on their emotional state, which is the ‘otherworld’ visited in the games, and the movie, and the third is The Birth of the Holy Mother, where the God comes into existance in our world). For the person to complete the ritual of the Holy Assumption, they must die in our world- the God will be birthed in their new world, which is tied to our world, and also the world of the Gods.
Dahlia burned Alessa in order to complete the ritual, the pain and suffering nuruting Samael into existance. Problem was, Alessa survived and her soul was split- one half was reborn as Harry Mason’s (that’s Rose in the film) daughter Cheryl (that’s Sharon), the other remained Alessa, who later died and indeed created a new world based on her emotions of hatred and suffering. So, the cult lure harry and Cheryl back to Silent Hill in order to rejoin the halves of the soul and birth Samael. Samael is born, and Harry kills it with a hunting rifle (never really understood that bit- but I geuss they just needed an end boss).
My main problem with this otherwise flawless theory (there is plenty of evidence to support it) is that Silent Hill 2 and the movie make absolutly no sense whatsoever based on it. I can only assume that there was a different writer for SH2, and that the guys making the film didn’t take the time to work ou what was ACTUALLY going on in the source material.
long story short- no, the film doesn’t make any sense.
Glad you asked?
