Silent Hill f Is the Series’ Most Profound Reckoning with the Horror of Home

By Grace Benfell | October 30, 2025 | 1:30pm

Video Games Features silent hill f

Silent Hill f Is the Series’ Most Profound Reckoning with the Horror of Home

Whether they work or not, a home is the domain of a woman. It is the place she is expected to hold and maintain, a place she may inherit from her mother, or a place where her father or husband may trap her. All people have homes, or at least a place where they sleep, but women are expected, if not required, to be its angels. In 1999, players first visited Silent Hill as outsiders. Harry Mason was waylaid in the town after a car accident. His adopted daughter goes missing. Over time, he discovers that she is from Silent Hill originally. The occult forces in the town called her home. Throughout the series, men are foreigners drawn to Silent Hill by the women who belong there. Silent Hill is a place men visit, but it’s where women live.

This article contains spoilers for Silent Hill 1-4 and Silent Hill f.

Because every Silent Hill game concerns domestic spaces and cycles of birth and rebirth, themes of home, and of women’s particular relationship to it, emerge all over the series. The most pointed example of this before Silent Hill f is Silent Hill 3. It’s the first game in the series where you play as a woman. At first, unlike the protagonists which proceeded her, Heather Mason starts with no interest in entering the town. However, on a visit to her neighborhood mall, she finds the place has transformed in to a hellish, fleshy outgrowth of the titular town. She makes her way home to escape, only to find that Silent Hill waiting for her. She is the child Harry rescued all those years before. Her old home is stretching its metal claws to her new one.

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These themes still emerge in Silent Hill 2, where all the principle characters are outsiders. Nevertheless, Mary still writes her husband from inside the town. The James-conjured incarnation of her, Maria, is born from the town’s supernatural energies. At one point, the town turns into a fleshy mirror of side character Angela’s house. Silent Hill is a place which summons forth ideals and incarnations of home. James’ resentment toward Mary, and the reason he kills her, is rooted in the way her illness feminizes him and makes him into a caretaker. He would rather die than stay home, a fate which Mary is nevertheless resigned to.

At first glance, Silent Hill 4: The Room may seem to undo this dichotomy. After all, a young man, Henry Townshend, occupies its titular room. But the game’s vision of domesticity conjures the oppressive structure of women’s lives. The game’s villain, Walter Sullivan, is obsessed with Henry’s apartment, calling it his “mother.” He believes that by possessing the apartment and performing a ritual sacrifice within it, he can be reborn. Therefore, the apartment itself is a site of reproduction, which Walter seeks to control with violence. Silent Hill 4 is about the implicit femininity of the home.

Silent Hill f is perhaps the most intimate exploration of home. Like Heather Mason, the fog rolls over Hinako Shimizu’s life on a normal day. Unlike Heather, it is not calling from outside place, it arrives just a few blocks away from her house. Essentially, the entire game takes place within Hinako’s hometown. Yet, Silent Hill f’s perspective is still more intimate. Every one of Silent Hill f’s four playthroughs revolve around her comings and goings from home. Its emotional landscape plants itself in the possibility and dread associated with leaving home and the comfort and fear of returning. When she returns home for the first time, her house loops in over itself, recurring into mirrors of mirrors. It is like multiple locks on a door (an image which Silent Hill 4 conjures throughout its runtime). Home lasts forever. You can never get out.

However, leaving home also charged with significance; if remaining home can represent a confining of identity, leaving home can represent a loss of identity. Throughout the game, as the mysterious Fox Mask leads her through a set of occult marriage rituals, Hinako uses her surname as a means of grounding herself. But after the rituals remove her arm, brand her back, and slice off her face, her ability to remember her surname begins to vanish. When Hinako returns to her home a final time, as a blushing, monstrous fox bride, her weeping father forbids her from returning. Her bridal gown severs her from home and veils the relationships which came before. To underline the point, Hinako seizes both her father and mother with her gigantic hands and crushes them in her fist.

From the very start, Hinako’s relationship with home is fraught and dialectic. It is the source of a loving relationship with her sister, who is now married and absent. It is also the site of her father’s abuse and mother’s acquiescence. Yet leaving home does not represent a relief from these tensions or a possible reuniting with her sister. Instead, it represents a new kind of alienation. Another home, still not one of Hinako’s own, which undercuts her connections which her friends and loved ones.

The place threaded through both these homes is Silent Hill’s dream world. In the game’s startling and abstract first ending, years take place in symbolic dreamscapes and fragments of meaning. When Hinako takes a rampage through her invaded, foggy hometown, armed with nothing but a twisted pipe and a box of painkillers, it is a reflection of a killing spree in the real world. While the acquiescing Hinako lived on, a part of her remained in the dream world. One day, coping was not enough. Like home, Silent Hill is a place that can swallow multiple years all at once. It’s unclear in the initial ending whether Hinako’s rampage has taken place within the bounds of her hometown or not. In either case, she has not left Silent Hill.

Throughout the series, Silent Hill stands in for what we must confront but cannot bring ourselves to. Because of the looming shadow of Silent Hill 2, people most often understand that to be about grief and trauma. But it also respresents, especially in the cases of Heather Mason and Hinako Shimizu, the forces that exist outside of our control. We are all born to a home. Many people remain there for all their lives. But whether we escape or remain, we must linger over what that place has made of us and what we will make of it. Silent Hill is a long exercise in recurring confrontations with that truth.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.