#Silent hill kindergarten cop full#

Anyway, back to Silent Hill, the Keys for Eclipse are named Lion, Woodman, and Scarecrow, and Alessa has a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in her bedroom. If ever there was a trippy children’s story that could be reclassified as horror it’s Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (and if you want to take things to the next level there are the Wheelers in the film sequel, Return to Oz-holy shit, they give even the monsters of Silent Hill a run for their money). She finds herself in a mansion, the owner of which is Ernest Baldwin. In special re-releases of Silent Hill 2 there’s the additional ‘Born From A Wish’ scenario in which players control Maria. You’ll find Hemingway branded cigarettes in Silent Hill Origins, Shattered Memories, and Downpour. It’s also a memento in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In Central Silent Hill there’s a cafe called ‘A Moveable Feast’, after Hemingway’s 1964 novel. Crichton Street suggests this is a reference to Michael Crichton’s 1995 novel The Lost World, but it could also be referencing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book which is a favourite story of Alessa’s and inspired the air screamer monsters. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories there’s the ‘My Flying Lizard’ memento, which is described as ‘Lost World Terry’. Paul Wilson and not me, Michael David Wilson-'hey, so we’ve looked into the future and in a few decades MDW is going to start up This Is Horror, then he’ll write a Silent Hill column for LitReactor … should probably reference him in the game.”). Parallel to it is Wilson Street (a reference to F. Silent Hill starts the Michael Crichton references simply enough with ‘Crichton Street’, one of the major roads in Central Silent Hill with (Carl) Sagan Street and Koontz Street coming off of it. And I’m sure you all know what ‘Infinite Jest’ is referencing, right? Then there’s the Infinite Jest memento in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a ring with a skull-and-crossbones and the word ‘Ophelia’ who is, of course, Hamlet’s love interest. Not only are the monsters based off The Tempest, but there’s even a poster within the theater. The Artaud Theater-which you’ll find on Koontz Street(!)-in Silent Hill: Origins pays homage to The Tempest. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, ‘Twelfth Night’ is referenced and claimed to be ‘probably the best Shakespeare comedy’. In normal mode you just have to arrange the books out of numerical order, but in hard mode each book corresponds to a Shakespeare play- Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello-and the difficulty of the puzzle is upped considerably.Īpparently, the creators of Silent Hill were really into their Shakespeare puzzles. The initial note reads ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’, a quote taken from the three witches scene in Macbeth. To kick things off there’s an entire ‘Shakespeare puzzle’ in Silent Hill 3, which you’ll find in the shopping centre. Yet in Silent Hill there are various references and allusions to Shakespeare. Whilst Stephen King is an obvious literary influence for a horror video game, William Shakespeare isn’t (though there are moments of horror in plays like Titus Andronicus and Hamlet). Now, you can’t quite tell it’s King in all his pixelated glory unless you’re familiar with the original taken from The Maine Campus student newspaper in 1970, but it’s there in the original Silent Hill inside the Café 5to2 (which, fun fact, is named after the café in Natural Born Killers). If that’s not enough, Stephen King himself is displayed on a poster that reads ‘Study Dammit’. A garage door has ‘Redrum’ scrawled across it in blood, and posters of Carrie and Pet Sematary show up in town.

Hopefully, they will find my notes useful.” This references a line from King’s The Mist: “I am going to leave these pages on the counter and perhaps someday someone will find them and read them.”īut that’s not the only or most obvious text lifted from King. In the original Silent Hill, before saving your progress via a notebook and pen, text appears that reads: “Someday, someone may experience these bizarre events. For starters, there are a number of streets and roads referencing various literary greats-including Bachman Road, an illusion to King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman, under which he penned titles such as Thinner, The Long Walk, and The Running Man. Perhaps the most obvious and frequently recurring influence is Stephen King. I could have written an article just as long on film references alone (highlights include David Lynch, Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, and Stanley Kubrick), but this is a literature site, so let's get to it. I knew going in there were a number of film, literary, and pop culture nods, but only in diving deeper down the rabbit hole have I discovered just how many.

#Silent hill kindergarten cop full#

This month we focus on the literary references, and believe me, the town and game are full of them.

Last month I wrote about the real town behind Silent Hill.