The Erotic and Grotesque Roots of Silent Hill f

Imagery from Silent Hill 2—which draws heavily from Ladder—takes on a different meaning when players learn James has smothered his wife. Creatures like Pyramid Head and the Bubbleheaded Nurses are revealed to be manifestations of various facets of the protagonist’s guilt and psychosexual grief. Similarly, Silent Hill f begs players to probe further into the toxic flora and shambling abominations with its first major reveal. Kera’s creature designs are as arousing as they are disturbing; the Kashimashi and Ayakakashi evoke Masahiro Ito’s Mannequin and Nurse designs in their twisted distortions of erotic desire. 

These design choices have kinship with ero guro artwork, itself derived from the “erotic grotesque nonsense” movement of pre-WWII Imperial Japan. The term is as it sounds—disgusting, meaningless content that arouses the consumer. Of course, this term—coined shortly in popular magazines of the ‘20s and ‘30s—is deliberate misdirection. Erotic grotesque work is steeped in metaphor, so context-dependent that—to those not “in the know”—it appears to be irredeemable, ghoulish filth. Genre pioneer Edogawa Rampo utilized bizarre, often disturbing kinks such as forniphilia to make veiled potshots at Imperial Japan’s upper class and poke holes at established social norms.

Similar eroticized graphic violence in Japanese art predates this 20th century explosion in popularity, of course. 1800s printmaker Tsukioka Yoshitoshi is known for his “28 Murders By Verse” series, for example—vivid, detailed, and beautiful depictions of heinous acts by historical figures. But it is the explosion of erotic grotesque as a popular literary and artistic movement in the early 20th century—and its subsequent resurrection from the ‘50s onward—that propelled mid-century guro artists to push a new, more dangerous envelope under America’s political and economic surveillance.

One such artist was Toshio Saeki, whose work hangs heavy like fog over Silent Hill f. Like NeoBards’ game, Saeki’s art is squarely focused on the sociopolitical tension between the Economic Miracle era schoolgirl and the dying, vestigial remains of tradition. In the artist’s world, Japanese femininity of the past is a ghost which haunts young girls, enforced by grim-faced old men and demons from folklore alike. Saeki draws a parallel between these last two, with the masculine often taking on a patriarchal, conservative force that does harm in the name of antiquated gender politics.

It is difficult to typify Saeki’s art with a single descriptor, or to pin down his main preoccupation. While his art largely focuses on the capture, assault, and mutilation of young women, what those acts mean vary largely from piece to piece. But one predominant, permeating theme is that capture of the modern by tradition—a recursive inability to outrun the past and its violence. Imperial soldiers and older women alike torment young girls for sexual amusement in his art. Saeki’s men are fixated on nationalist fetish, as they lick exposed bone on geisha’s legs and thrust into them from behind as their wives slit their throats.

Saeki’s art, I feel, is crucial to understanding the imagery and subtext of Silent Hill f. It is difficult to not draw parallels between his quintessential bobbed schoolgirl and Hinako herself. While this is a consequence of both drawing from the same well—hegemonic feminine beauty standards—there are too many specific similarities to ignore outright. A doll in a red polka-dotted dress, for example, warns Hinako of danger throughout the game; a similar doll can be found in some of Saeki’s pieces.

In one Saeki illustration, a man prepares to hack off a young girl’s arm on a tree stump as limbless elders cheer in the background. The piece can be taken as a commentary on feminine autonomy—the man is hobbling the woman to take him under his wing. His ancestors cheer him on, because he’s following in their footsteps. Compare this to Hinako’s transformation in the other world; the title invokes similar imagery in regards to liberation and control, but takes it one step further by giving Hinako the illusion of power. 

Both Silent Hill f and the artwork of Toshio Saeki indict aging, decrepit systems of governing necropolitics as a primary source of violence towards young women. Hinako is the recipient of not only her father’s abuse and an arranged marriage, but outright ostracization from female friends and her own mother alike. Both Hinako’s mother and her classmates are defensive about their way of life—so secured in their prized male that they will doom the future of a young girl just to hold onto it.

Hinako has begun taking prescription pills to deal with stress headaches that stem from her situation. This is an in-game item which cannot be used as an offering at one of the game’s upgrade points. By the game’s spiritual praxis, these pills are not sacred. This a hint that the player should probably not use them for the game’s best possible outcome. Later notes point to beastly side effects, as well as hint to the detrimental effect on Hinako’s body and psyche. Players also learn that the pill is rooted in traditional Chinese healing, meant to realign the chi of those who imbibe. 

There is significance to the drug being Chinese in origin, but similar in function to an American-made painkiller—like, say, Nazi-sourced tranquilizer Thalidomide. Japan’s military history with China is a dark spot for both nations, defined by violent colonization and punitive sexual violence as social control mechanisms. Relevant to Silent Hill f, however, are the experiments of microbiologist and military officer Shiro Iishii. His Unit 731 was an Imperial Japanese research lab set up in what is now Northeast China. The pretense of this facility was to research the effects of weapons, test experimental surgeries, and run trials on subjects. 

The reality was far more grim. Chinese civilians were kidnapped and forced into experiments whose usefulness was outweighed by their brutality. Live vivisections without anesthetic were performed on women impregnated by colonial rape. Prisoners were exposed to lethal diseases and noxious chemicals. Sexually transmitted diseases were intentionally forced onto women in order to test mother-to-child transmission. Unit 731 was as close to a living hell as human beings have constructed, rivalled perhaps only by Nazi concentration camps and Abu Ghraib. At the twilight of World War II, the Imperial Army killed all remaining prisoners, burnt their corpses, and destroyed the facility outright. All that remained was the raw data—clinical results of now-obfuscated trials.

American organizations were—understandably—very interested in this data; historian Sheldon Harris refers to the research as “forbidden fruit” in his book, Factories of Death. These were results Western scientists wanted to further their own research, but couldn’t obtain via ethical means. But if the unethical data was obtained by forcing the hand of America’s former enemy, those researchers wouldn’t have to get their own hands dirty. General Douglas MacArthur cut a deal with the Unit 731 physicians: if the American government could get their chemical warfare data, they would not have to answer for their crimes. 

 “One half-century after the events,” Sheldon wrote in 1999, “United States intelligence agencies still refuse to release materials that may have some bearing on the issue. The embarrassment persists.”

As there were no documented survivors, the 200,000 to 300,000 victims—mostly Chinese, but also Russian and Korean—were never served justice. Instead, modern science was built on a foundation of their broken bones and flayed flesh.

Silent Hill f invokes this history of permissiveness to make a specific, politicized point about the subjugation of girls and women post-WWII. An example of this dark history can be found in Okinawa, whose populace has suffered under both Japanese colonial and American military rule. 

Writes Kathryn A. Blau in her 2024 essay, “Japan’s Sacrificial Daughter”: 

Before the U.S. victory over Japan in WWII, the Japanese imperial army created 130 military brothels on Okinawa and the women forced to work there were Okinawans (Enloe 2009, 240). When military forces occupy or invade an area, they will often consider the sexual abuse and exploitation of the area’s population as a natural trophy for the victorious country (Takazato 1999, 71). In this way, the Japanese military leaders established brothels, which demonstrated that violence against women was structural and ingrained in the Japanese military culture and system. Sexual exploitation followed the American victory and the stationing of troops in the post-WWII Okinawan occupation. 

But Japan’s exploitation of its own women, post-WWII, is not limited to the Okinawan people. In Silent Hill f, players learn that Hinako’s father is deep in debt; this is the major contributing factor behind ceding his daughter to Kotoyuki. He laughs with relief and joy at the marriage in one scene, as he’s finally dealt with his rebellious daughter and his financial woes in one arrangement.

“She’s going to do as she’s told for once,” he says, “and help me pay off this debt!”

Hinako is implicitly an asset here—something to be traded if she loses value. This mirrors a real-world phenomenon, often dramatized by popular exploitation pictures of the era like 1968’s Blue Film Woman. Yakuza debtors trafficked indebted women—both domestic and foreign—to the Imperial Army pre-WWII. 

Historian and author Marc Driscoll described the enterprise as such in a 2011 interview:

Between 30,000 and 60,000 young Japanese women, most of them kidnapped, were brought to Asia from 1885-1920 to do sex work in the booming Japanese commercial areas in Korea, Northeast China, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. The appeal they had for male consumers led these same consumers to buy Japanese food, liquor, and other merchandise and stimulated a general ‘desire’ for things Japanese.

One aspect of this trade Driscoll’s book, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, deals with are contemporary nationalists who argued sexual slavery was necessary for the survival of East Asian culture. Writes the author:

Almost all countries had banned human trafficking by 1910, but important Japanese leaders decried the ban as Christian erotophobia and, as non-Christians, they opposed it and its assumptions of universality. Popular Japanese sexologists writing in the 1920s argued strongly that East Asia since 800 AD had always had sex districts and pleasure quarters and in fact wouldn’t be East Asia without them. Unfortunately, this contributed to the so-called comfort women system, where anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 women were trafficked as sex slaves by Japanese militarists beginning in the early 1930s.

This, too, makes the red pill’s roots in traditional Chinese medicine even more pointed. The pill can be seen as the physical, medicinal embodiment of cross-cultural misogynistic violence. It is an herb pillaged from a country whose populace was raped, synthesized and fed back to an oppressed woman in order to keep her complacent and malleable. 

Silent Hill f, from this perspective, can be read as a parable on how masculine violence in Japan was redirected inward after the government’s imperial military ambitions were cuckolded by America on the global stage. This, itself, has a direct correlation to the country’s ongoing epidemic of unreported rapes—reflected in contemporary “erotic grotesque” pornography such as Bonita’s “Group of Brutal Rapists” series as well as a plethora of erotic manga.

Silent Hill f’s direct engagement with post-modern erotic grotesque artwork, a specific period setting, and the game’s laser-focused POV points to a work with implicitly feminist intent. “Feminism,” in the West, has become such a contentious cudgel that we often forget genuine feminist art defies contemporary understandings of the term. Works such as Hanan Al-Shaik’s Story of Zahra, for instance, do not shy away from heinous sexual assault and graphic violence; these are, in fact, tools in the artist’s arsenal to make their point even more salient. 

In other words—it is limiting and reductive to conceptualize “feminist” games as titles that don’t deal with extreme subject matter. The same, too, can be said of ero guro—sometimes typified as craven and misogynistic, but often rooted in an implicit empathy for feminine pain.

An effective example of how upsetting subject matter as insightful commentary in Silent Hill f are the Spawning Monsters. “A hideous monster covered in countless skin cysts,” reads the in-game description. “It spawns monster after monster from the dreadful-smelling clumps of flesh it drops. Filthy, foul, and repulsive. The wonders of birth do not apply to this.”

These creatures are among the most grotesque in Silent Hill f—and that’s because they’re what Hinako is (arguably) most frightened of. Their fronts are bloated clusters of flesh, filled with acidic pus and capable of birthing the doll-like . The clusters are akin to both breasts and prepartum stomachs. Observed from the back, players can see a shriveled, hunched woman supporting the weight of her own body. 

When taken with the anxieties Hinako has about being stripped of her freedom—in conjunction with the series’ history in metaphorical representations of protagonists’ psyches—these creatures take on a depressing context. They are the girl’s fear of what she will become, like so many other women in her town. Her womb, her heart, her very essence will no longer belong to her, instead dominion to a man she’s been commanded to love. She will be reared to produce more “dolls”—warped facsimiles of classical beauty. Simply, reproduction is an appalling but inevitable spectacle that Hinako feels trapped by. 

This specific anxiety points to one way Silent Hill f not only draws from the erotic grotesque pantheon, but advances it with contemporary concerns. The game is not solely preoccupied with Hinako’s subjugation and helplessness; in fact, the opposite is true. If classical erotic grotesque work is a metaphorical representation of misogyny, then Silent Hill f is one of misogyny’s consequences. It is a question of what happens after a young girl is maimed a la one of Saeki’s subjects. Can a girl truly be destroyed, or does she simply change forms?

In his book, Driscoll suggests the explosive popularity of “ero-guro” literature between the ‘20s and ‘30s had some causality to what transpired under Imperial Rule. Says Driscoll on his blog,

Similar to both Weimar culture in Germany and the Jazz Age in the US, Japan’s erotic-grotesque writers, artists, and performers downloaded the understanding of East Asian sexuality from Japanese sexologists […] as completely opposed to the erotophobia of the Christian West. Therefore, the representation of sexuality in Japan’s erotic-grotesque modernism was much more celebratory and promotional than in the West.

However, these codes of sexuality gradually became more extreme and sensationalistic. Partially out of the need of publishers and writers to compete in an urban marketplace that was obsessed with the new and bizarre, they came to feature necrophilia, cannibalism and sadism as regular themes. This is important because I think that—ironically, since many producers were in fact Marxists or highly critical of colonial militarism—this culture of the erotic-grotesque ended up contributing to the atrocities that Japanese men committed in China and Southeast Asia.

What, then, does Silent Hill f hope to accomplish with this imagery—and all of its baggage—in the most mainstream evocation of guro in interactive entertainment to date? The nature of erotic grotesque artwork means readings will vary from player to player. Classical Japanese art largely eschews the explanatory exposition and literalism of colonial Western literature in favor of veiled meanings behind loaded symbolism. This has deep roots in Japanese theatre—specifically noh, the oldest surviving performance art tradition. 

Writes Edwin Lee in The Atlantic,

In Noh theater, there is little plot. Many performances are allegorical and metaphorical; historically, spectators were educated, thus they were familiar with the stories being represented and were able to appreciate the subtle references within the words and movements. Noh actors wear intricately carved masks to which they have a deep spiritual connection; some are handed down through generations and believed to contain energies from past performers.

Hinako’s fox mask in Silent Hill f is a deliberate evocation of this stage tradition. It embodies both her spiritual and physical transformation, as well as a deep connection to the past. This is the biggest indicator of the game’s true intent—that is to say, to not have one unified, single reading. Instead, NeoBards provides players with symbols and riddles—severed edges of puzzle pieces the player must reconstruct. 

Whether or not the player chooses to learn about Japan’s pervasive history of misogynistic violence, America’s complicit enforcement of it, or the artistic movement that attempted to reckon with both is up to them. Because Silent Hill f’s puzzles don’t stop after the final ending. Like Saeki’s art—and the erotic grotesque movement itself—there are decades of discourse nestled into each and every polygon, line of dialogue, and everything in between—right down to the very last red pill.

Madeline Blondeau has been writing about games since 2010. She’s written for Paste, Anime Herald, Anime News Network, CGM, and Lock-On, among others. In addition, she has written, hosted, and recorded film criticism podcast Cinema Cauldron. Her published fiction debut is due out between 2026 and 2027. You can support her work on Patreon, and find her on BlueSky @mads.haus.