I recently managed to watch Silent Hill, the movie, which I found very interesting considering that Silent Hill has been a video game franchise all these years, so when I got the movie, I thought perhaps it was a another bad movie like Street Fighter or like the Far Cry movie.

But to my surprise, the movie is interesting, having played the original Silent Hill way back in 1999 on my PlayStation One. The movie not only takes elements from the games, but at the same time introduces its own version to the story. For example in the first game Harry Mason drives to Silent Hill with his daughter Cheryl for a holiday. Harry swerves his car to avoid hitting a girl in the road and as a result crashes the vehicle, losing consciousness. In the movie, the main protagonist is Rose, whose adopted-daughter has troubling sleeping because she keeps dreaming of the town.

Just like Harry, Rose also crashes her car when she takes, Sharon to Silent Hill in an attempt for Sharon to conquer her demons. While Harry’s wife does not get mentioned in the video games, the film shows Rose’s husband, Christopher, who comes after his family to Silent Hill. According to the story in the movie the town is destroyed by violent coal-fires and as a result has become un-inhabitable, because the fumes still pouring from the coal fires transport people to an alternate dimension.

Again like in the original video game, when Harry wakes up, his daughter is gone and he begins searching for her in the town, Harry encounters many characters in the beginning of the like Dahlia Gillespie, who is more out to destroy the phantasm of her daughter Alessa. In contrast to the film, Rose also encounters Dahlia, but unlike the video game, Dahlia is only speaking of terrible things done to her own daughter, Alessa.

In the video game storyline, Dahlia had performed a ritual to impregnate her daughter Alessa, with their cult’s deity, the baby born was Harry’s adopted daughter Cheryl. The video game gets to a point where the game has different endings that could be decided by the player. In the video game the police officer, Cybil Bennett survives in the game whereas in the film she gets burned alive by the religious cult that is run by Dahlia’s sister Christabella. Christabella in the film assists Rose and Cybil to find the demon that has kidnapped Rose’s daughter Sharon.

However it turns out that Christabella and her religious cult were the ones that victimized Alessa, calling her a witch and later on trying to burn the child alive. The cult’s plan backfired and as a result the town was burned to the ground. Alessa apparently survived and had a daughter Sharon, who was adopted by Rose and Christopher. The ending also has a good twist to it which I will not reveal here for those who have not seen the film.

I liked the movie version of Silent Hill, because it brought with it, its own story, blending in elements from the video games. When I watched the movie, I was expecting the results from the video game, but to my surprise the storyline was different to that of the video games.