As well as announcing a remake of Silent Hill 2 being developed by Bloober Team, a new game called Silent Hill Townfall from No Code and Annapurna Interactive, another new game called Silent Hill F, plus whatever the interactive live event Silent Hill Ascension turns out to be, Konami revealed that the upcoming third Silent Hill movie will adapt the story of the second videogame.
Christophe Gans, who directed the first, slightly more popular movie in the series, will be back to direct Return to Silent Hill. “We decided to go back to the best of these stories,” Gans said in today’s announcement. “I mean Silent Hill 2. The film is the story of a young guy coming back to Silent Hill, where he has known a great love, and what he is going to find is a pure nightmare.”
Several scenes familiar from the game were recognizable in storyboards and artwork from the upcoming movie shown during the transmission: James discovering Eddie vomiting into a toilet, James and Maria arriving at Brookhaven Hospital, and James about to encounter his first monster in a tunnel. Producer Victor Hadida described Return to Silent Hill as “very modern but also very true to the videogame” while also saying, “Christophe is a real gamer. He has been immersed in this world.”
One challenge Return to Silent Hill will face is that the other movies in the series already plundered Silent Hill 2 for monster designs. While loosely based on the first game’s plot, the first movie featured notable enemies from the second game like the bubble-head nurses, one of the squirming, body-bagged “lying figures”, and of course Pyramid Head. “One of my major goals in this film is how to redesign the classic monster of Silent Hill,” said Gans. “I was talking about Red Pyramid, you know, the guy with the helmet. He’s again in this one.”
“The monsters are one of the elements that the fans are waiting for,” said Hadida, “and we are updating those in a way that the creation is similar, but they will be striking.”
According to Rui Naito, an assistant producer at Konami in charge of Silent Hill’s cross-media development, it was actually the movie that inspired the current revival of the videogames. “We received a fantastic film concept and script and we thought, ‘This is going to be a great film!’ However, part of me wondered whether it was enough to just make a new film. We wanted to bring back the game series as well,” he said.
Naito also said, “we already have storyboards and image boards, but actually filming and casting are still in the works,” so don’t expect Return to Silent Hill to be in theatres any time soon.