Lord only knows why, 3 months from release, Open Road Pictures didn’t have this lined up and ready to go at Comic Con instead of the 1 minute random nurse clip we got, but regardless, courtesy of Yahoo! Movies, there’s finally a trailer confirming that yes, Silent Hill: Revelation is a thing that’s still happening.
I’ll admit to being the site’s resident Silent Hill fanboy. The games and the first film have a direct tap set up to what scares me; what my nightmares not so much look, but feel like. Christophe Gans managed to translate an impressive amount of that to the screen. Even with all that movie’s problems–and there are many–it manages to neither look, sound, or act like anything else in the current horror atmosphere, especially the ending, which I still hold up as one of the most haunting final notes ever to play out in a movie theater.
At least at first glance, Revelation seems to have handled the hand-off from Gans and Roger Avary to new writer/director Michael J. Bassett without a hitch. It looks the look and walks the walk. I’m not the biggest fan of Jon Snow being shoehorned in there, possibly making same mistake the first film made with Sean Bean, and god damn do I hate how they mention the 3D here. Everything else is ripped straight out of Silent Hill 3.
That’s part of the problem, though, since Silent Hill 3‘s one of the weaker, more straight-forward adventure-y entries of the games, story-wise, and the bulk of it’s already on display in this trailer. Gans managed to beef up SH1‘s flimsy story with some clumsy, yet still effective religious/maternal allegory, as well as some wonderfully fucked up moments of surrealist horror. Aside from one mouth-agape horrifying moment before the final boss (think Prometheus‘ best scene, but with a literal Morning After Pill From Hell instead of a first aid chamber), the game Revelation is based on doesn’t really have anything on par with Pyramid Head flinging religious zealot skin at a church doorway, or barbed wire rape. I haven’t seen anything else Bassett has done (Just about everyone I know who’s seen Solomon Kane dug it, but that’s about it), but he’s holding the pen and pointing the camera on this. Here’s hoping he managed to make this bird fly. The trailer bodes well, though. We’ll all find out October 26th.