Upcoming Silent Hill 2 Film Gets First Teaser Alongside January Release Date

RETURN TO SILENT HILL brings the iconic horror franchise back to the screen. When James receives a mysterious letter from his lost love Mary, he is drawn to Silent Hill—a once-familiar town now consumed by darkness. As he searches for her, James faces monstrous creatures and unravels a terrifying truth that will push him to the edge of his sanity.

Although the teaser trailer showed a few scenes somewhat similar to the PS2 game, the tone seems quite a bit different, with Jeremy Irvine playing a much more frantic James than his emotionally numb video game counterpart. The trailer also has a relatively frantic pace, and while this could come down to how the teaser was edited, it will be interesting to see if they can condense the game’s story into a 105-minute runtime while maintaining its slow-burn tension.

Even though Gans’ 2006 adaptation of the first Silent Hill game mostly followed the plot of the original, it included changes like replacing the protagonist Harry with a woman named Rose because, as he said in an interview with EGM, “We realized after two weeks in the writing process that Harry was actually motivated by feminine, almost maternal feelings,” and that “He worked fine in the game, but for a real actor, it was too strange. It’s not that he’s effeminate, but he’s acting like a woman.” Damn, nothing more “feminine” than not wanting your child to be lost in a hellish murder town full of flesh monsters, I guess.

Even if we put aside the blatant gender essentialism here and give Gans the benefit of the doubt because this quote is 20 years old, his decision to stuff Pyramid Head and other monsters from Silent Hill 2 into his 2006 movie demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of how these creatures were meant to represent James’ specific psychological torments. Perhaps things will fare better with the latest film because Gans gets to actually adapt the second game, but we will see for sure early next year.