Carceral horror: Punishment and control in Silent Hill

Introduction

Images of crime and crime control litter the late modern mediascape. Our screens and pages are splattered with blood and gore as we cheer and jeer cops, criminals, lawyers, prisoners, and guards. While some may claim this material is merely fun and games, content that captures our political and public imaginations is never just entertainment. Instead, media is intricately linked to the social processes and structures that oscillate around rule breaking, construction, and enforcement (Browning and Picart, 2009; Ferrell et al., 2015; Picart and Greek, 2007). These texts transmit, reflect, distort, and even disturb social conditions and public consciousness.

Of central concern for this analysis is the role of prisons and punishment within popular culture. Prisons have become regular fixtures in late modern media—a fact which is perhaps unsurprising in America considering that the country warehouses the most prisoners in the world per capita. Life behind bars has been portrayed in numerous television shows and movies such as Orange is the New Black (2013), The Night of (2016), Oz (1997), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), and The Green Mile (1999) and scholars have begun scrutinizing such media representations (e.g. Enck and Morrissey, 2015; Fiddler, 2007; Terry, 2016). Despite this growing interest, few have examined prisons and punishment in one of the fastest growing and most influential forms of media in recent years: video games (Downing and Levan, 2016; MacMillan and Page, 2009). Such an omission is vexing as crime and crime control are often core themes within interactive media. Prisons in particular are central to the design of games like Prison Architect (2012), Prison Tycoon (2005), The Suffering (2004), Prison Break: The Conspiracy (2010), Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), and The Escapists (2014) and such facilities make appearances in many other games including the Dark Souls series (2011, 2014, 2016), Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (2000), Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent (2006), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), and Final Fantasy VIII (1999) to name a few.

Though representations of prisons and punishment are evident in many entertainment genres, perhaps the most visceral are found in horror. The titillation of violence and the intrigue of criminal apprehension and processing provide a smorgasbord of subject matter suited to terrify and disturb. The current study explores the relationship between mediated play, peril, and punishment in the horror game genre through the Silent Hill series (hereby referred to collectively as Silent Hill). Published by the Japanese company Konami, Silent Hill has been canonized internationally as an exemplar of survival horror. Survival horror is a video game subgenre characterized by linear gameplay, the use of puzzles and key items to unlock routes forward, and visual and narrative techniques borrowed from horror cinema to evoke “a strong experience of fear or related emotional states (apprehension, anxiety, alarm, terror, despair)” (Therrien, 2009: 35; Krzywinska, 2009; Taylor, 2009). Silent Hill 2 in particular is often lauded as one of the most influential horror games ever made. Such acclaim may be the reason Silent Hill games are perhaps one of the most studied in the genre (e.g. Carr, 2003; Kirkland, 2005, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2009d, 2010; Niedenthal, 2009; Perron, 2009, 2012; Picard, 2009; Pinchbeck, 2009; Taylor, 2009; Therrien, 2009). Yet, despite this academic prominence, little to no attention has been given to the rampant use of prisons and punishment within these games.

To examine Silent Hill’s punitive and carceral dimensions, this analysis employs cultural criminology which addresses late modern media as “a circulating cultural fluidity that challenges any certain distinction between an event and its representation, a mediated image and its effects, a criminal moment and its ongoing construction within collective meaning” (Ferrell et al., 2015: 55; Ferrell, 2013). This perspective is combined with an appreciation of ‘Gothic criminology’ which examines mediated representations of criminality, otherness, evil, and related desiderata. Gothic criminology argues that such representations are not wholly subject to mythologization but, instead, show how fiction and reality blur and intermingle (Fiddler, 2007, 2013; Picart and Greek, 2003, 2007, 2009; Rafter and Ystehede, 2010). Both cultural and Gothic criminology appreciate that media and popular culture are more complicated than missives transmitting ideologies of the powerful. Rather, creative content—particularly that which invokes the Gothic—is a “projection of anxiety that strives to reinforce cultural boundaries” while also providing a means to “actively disrupt these very same boundaries and to expose their cultural fragility” (Sothcott, 2016: 436). As Silent Hill makes use of Gothic and other horrific themes and visuals (Niedenthal, 2009; Taylor, 2009), this series would seem to be an appropriate place to begin an investigation into the use of carceral punitivity as a horror device through cultural and Gothic criminology.

Before describing the results of this analysis, a brief discussion of the horror genre and its connections to social and ontological anxieties is provided, followed by a description of the methodological approach taken in this study—a combination of ethnographic content analysis and autoethnography. The results of this analysis reveal two dominant themes evident throughout the series’ design elements and narratives: retribution and confinement. As argued in this study, Silent Hill—like many horror productions—revels in ambiguity and expresses cultural anxieties stemming from the paradoxical ‘vertiginous’ cultural sentiments of insecurity amidst increasing securitization and prisonization of society and everyday life (Young, 2007). Survival horror, including Silent Hill, is a ‘transnational’ phenomenon; it is a product of both Japanese and American cultural formations (Picard, 2009). This analysis therefore argues that Silent Hill reveals an American-Japanese public imagination that clamors for respite from insecurity while also becoming horrified by the carceral ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ it has created.

On horror

Silent Hill is largely set in the eponymous small rural town of Silent Hill, a desolate location that feels otherworldly, as if isolated in space and time by malevolent supernatural forces. The town is mostly abandoned except for a handful of supporting characters and a smattering of monstrous creatures. Fog, snow, rain, or darkness obscures the landscape and no escape from the town is evident as outbound avenues are often barricaded or destroyed. Each game involves guiding an everyman- or woman-style character through the streets and derelict buildings of Silent Hill and adjacent locations to fight monstrous enemies, collect items, solve puzzles, and combat ‘boss’ monsters before proceeding to the next game sequence. Rather than allow players to live out power fantasies and accomplish nigh superhuman feats, survival horror games like Silent Hill limit the mobility and combat prowess of playable avatars within these virtual settings to engender feelings of helplessness and vulnerability in the player.

As a horror game series, Silent Hill makes use of multiple characteristics endemic to the horror genre that not only contribute to the immediate and often visceral experience of playing these games, but also provide a foundation to explore the nexus of social circumstance, cultural context, and interpretation (Cohen, 1996; Poole, 2011). One such feature of horror employed by the series is monstrosity. While the exact characteristics of the monstrous are contested, Carroll (1990) usefully considers monstrosity as linked to impurity. He argues that an “object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless” (Carroll, 1990: 32). In other words, monsters present what Cohen (1996: 6) terms a “category crisis.” Monsters are thus beings that upset our sensibilities and assumptions about the natural order; they disrupt social categories and disturb our ontologies (Carroll, 1990; Cohen, 1996). Silent Hill frequently features monstrosities that appear unnatural and impure in appearance and behavior. For example, Silent Hill 3’s ‘closer’ is a lumbering amalgamation of sewn-together flesh. The monster brandishes giant needles that protrude and retract from its oversized, club-like arms and its tubular face features only a set of writhing human lips. The creature, while possessing human characteristics, is configured and warped in a manner decidedly inhuman, impure, and categorically interstitial.

Monsters are not only repulsively impure but they also often operate as mechanisms for the “presentation of social ills” (Ingebretsen, 2001: 28). As Poole (2011: 24) explains, monsters are “more than reference points for cultural obsessions. Monsters are ‘real’ in the sense that they not only symbolize, but also help to configure, worldviews and play a role in those worldviews. They live outside of our psyches.” A monster therefore signifies “something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again” (Cohen, 1996: 4). In this manner, this study responds to Picart and Greek’s (2007: 12) call for criminologists to examine the monstrous:

it is important to track the most gripping and recurrent visualizations of the “monstrous” in film and the media in order to lay bare the tensions that underlie the contemporary construction of the monstrous, which ranges in the twilight realm where divisions separating fact, fiction, and myth are porous.

In recent years, criminology has become more attuned to the role of monsters, particularly as a representation of a particular kind of existential/symbolic threat: the monstrous other (e.g. Jarvis, 2007; Linnemann et al., 2014; Metcalf, 2012). As argued in this analysis, the variegated monstrosities presented in Silent Hill are thus repulsive not only because of their impurities, but also because they embody uncomfortable truths about ourselves and society.

Horror media, like Silent Hill, may also elicit feelings of fear, anxiety, dread, and nausea through what Sigmund Freud described as Unheimlich or the uncanny (Carr, 2003; Kirkland, 2009a; Niedenthal, 2009; Reed; 2015; Spittle, 2011; Therrien, 2009; Tinwell et al., 2010). Spittle (2011: 314–315) describes the uncanny as, “represented by border figures that are ‘not quite right’; familiar but unfamiliar, in short, too close to the borders of our subjectivity for comfort. They occupy the realm of the uncanny.” Involved is a sense of strangeness arising from the paradoxical perception that something is both familiar and unfamiliar, where the real and the unreal become blurred. Fictive works, particularly of the horror genre, are positioned to exploit the uncanny, and confound the senses with perceptual (im)possibilities. Fiddler (2013), for instance, details how the ‘home invasion’ cinema genre creates horror through an invasion of an often monstrous other into otherwise secure homes. The categorical overlap of ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ thus renders these spaces unheimlich. As he states, “[t]he unheimlich atmosphere that is engendered by this unwelcome presence breaks down conventional categorisations of the internal and external, as well as that of the family unit itself” (Fiddler, 2013: 282).

Silent Hill incorporates the uncanny into its gameplay and aesthetic design (Carr, 2009; Kirkland, 2009a; Niedanthal, 2009). For instance, Kirkland (2009a) explains that “a great deal of attention has been paid to make Silent Hill as banally familiar as Bedford Falls, or Twin Peaks, or Blue Velvet’s Lumbertown” through its invocations of the small-town idyll (Kirkland, 2009a: 3). Yet these spaces are also riddled with monsters, corpses, bloodstains, and other visible signs of danger. Further, in many of the games the town periodically shifts from an “ordinary space to a dark doppelganger other world where walls become covered in dirt and rust, floors are transformed into rotting scaffolding, corridors are littered with soiled mattresses and broken wheelchairs” (Kirkland, 2009a: 3). In such a setting, the world becomes both ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ (Fiddler, 2013).

In a similar fashion, Kristeva (1982 [1980]) identifies horror emerging from the abject (see also Spittle, 2011). She explains that, “[i]t is thus not lack of cleanliness of health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 1982 [1980]: 4). For Kristeva (1982 [1980]: 5), the abject is an emptiness which we lack a coherent understanding of or even a language to tackle. Valier (2002: 321) describes the concept as “that which breaches borders.” It involves the disruption of perceived categorical distinctions between subject and object. By challenging these psychological boundaries, the abject invokes emotional reactions of horror or revulsion. Through its rampant use of rust, decay, injury, death, torture, blood, and other horrific devices, Silent Hill may elicit feelings of disgust and fright because it confronts the player with the precarity of identity and categorization. The materiality of death and the corruptibility of the body are made evident, thus threatening our sense of order. Interestingly, we are also attracted to the abject—we simultaneously want to avert our gaze and stare directly. Nightmarish creatures and scenarios frighten us even as we peek through the slits between our fingers.

Whether derived from monstrosity, the uncanny, the abject, or other mechanisms like ‘the marvelous’ or ‘the fantastic’ (Todorov, 1973 [1970]), it is clear that horror media, including Silent Hill, almost always involves the disruption, dissolution, or inversion of social and cognitive categories. By upsetting our sense of order and security, horror provides a reflection of ourselves and our ontologies. It frightens because it interrogates and disturbs psychological, social, and cultural formations. There thus is a political dimension to horror. This analysis therefore takes seriously horror as a cultural site of contested categorizations and social perversion by exploring the hideous amalgamation of play and punitivity featured throughout Silent Hill.

Method

The current study focuses on the eight games comprising the ‘main series’ of Silent Hill: Silent Hill 1 (1999; abbr. SH1), Silent Hill 2 (2001; abbr. SH2), Silent Hill 3 (2003; abbr. SH3), Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004; abbr. SH4), Silent Hill: Origins (2007; abbr. Origins), Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008; abbr. Homecoming), Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009; abbr. Shattered Memories), and Silent Hill: Downpour (2012; abbr. Downpour) (Table 1). ¹ Spin-offs, like Silent Hill: Book of Memories (2012), were not included as these often deviated so significantly from the survival horror genre that they would need to be examined independently (further, many of the spin-offs were never released in the US). This analysis also does not include P.T. (2014), the ‘playable teaser’ used to promote the now canceled Silent Hills game—a reimagining of the franchise. To facilitate analysis and interpretation, a translated version of Lost Memories (which features interpretations and descriptions of various elements of the first three Silent Hill games from the game developers) and the official player’s guides (books published to help persons navigate and complete these games) were also consulted. ²

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Table 1.

Descriptions of the Silent Hill games analyzed.

Title	Release year	Platform*	Playtime
Silent Hill 1	1999	PlayStation	4h 55m
Silent Hill 2	2001	Windows	5h 21m
Silent Hill 3	2003	Xbox 360	4h 01m
Silent Hill 4: The Room	2004	Windows	8h 24m
Silent Hill: Origins	2007	PlayStation 2	5h 32m
Silent Hill: Homecoming	2008	Xbox 360	10h 15m
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories	2009	PlayStation 2	5h 15m
Silent Hill: Downpour	2012	Xbox 360	8h 38m

*

Refers to platform of the game played for the analysis.

This study of Silent Hill employs what Altheide (1987: 86) calls ethnographic content analysis, which is “used to document and understand the communication of meaning, as well as verify theoretical relationships.” Drawing from this approach, the current analysis examines the images, mechanics, and narratives presented within each game. Any invocation of prison, punishment, or control through narratives, scenery, plot devices, characters, monsters, or other game elements was photographed, video recorded, or documented through notes to capture the experience. Photographic and video data were gathered through audio-visual recording hardware and software. These data were uploaded into the Atlas.ti qualitative analysis software and subjected to grounded theory-based analysis. Involved is a multi-stage, iterative, inductive coding process that allows for themes and patterns to emerge from the data (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). The themes and subthemes presented throughout are the results of this analysis. Overall, 1104 photos and 845 videos were analyzed.

As emotion and experience are vital to interpreting video games, particularly horrific ones, this analysis is also part autoethnography, relying on the researcher’s direct experiences with the game. Rather than eschew “moments (or prolonged periods) of empathy, embarrassment, fear, nervousness, dilemma, and so on,” autoethnographic approaches accept the lived experiences of the researcher as valid territory for academic analysis (Jewkes, 2011: 64). To make sense of the aforementioned pictures and videos in the context of horror and the Gothic, the researcher needs to be attuned to their own emotional reactions while immersed in these digital environments. Notes and recollections of the researcher’s experiences playing the games therefore inform the previously described content analysis. While this analysis emphasizes the presentation of content analysis data, the researcher’s experience was thus integral for making sense of said content through grounded theory analysis.

Carcerality in Silent Hill

Two primary themes manifested in the analysis of the Silent Hill series, the first being a preoccupation with retribution. Horrific events are enacted by the town of Silent Hill as punishments for crimes committed by certain characters. Many actors within the series are also motivated by revenge. Environments are frequently saturated with evidence of retributive punishments like executions and torture. These games also employ religious narratives and imagery to explore the horrific implications of divine retribution.

Second, this analysis found that Silent Hill focuses extensively on the control and monitoring of bodies in space, described here as confinement. The environmental design and gameplay mechanics are engineered to elicit feelings of isolation and powerlessness in the player. Many of the narratives in these games orient around captivity. Surveillance strategies are incorporated into the game design. Restraints and similar indications of bodily control are evinced in numerous monsters. Finally, carceral elements encroach upon the environment, particularly in the dark extra-dimensional ‘otherworld’ visited by numerous characters across the series. These themes are discussed in turn.

Retribution

Silent Hill punishes the guilty

Retribution—through either revenge or punishment of the guilty—is a recurring theme throughout Silent Hill. Perhaps the most notable occurrences involve the town punishing characters guilty of some transgression. In the games’ lore, Silent Hill is a place of supernatural power and is regarded as a monstrous character itself within the series. Lost Memories explains that “the town calls to those who bear the weight of some crime and shows them what is in their hearts” (Konami, 2003: 94). Indeed, such retribution is a central plot element across the series, particularly in SH2, Homecoming, and Downpour. SH2 is an exemplary case in this regard. Here, James Sunderland, the protagonist, is called to Silent Hill by a letter supposedly written by his wife (Mary), believed to have died three years prior of an illness. The player discovers during the game, however, that James murdered his wife on her deathbed. The town forces the protagonist to repeatedly confront his crimes as a kind of penance.

One method Silent Hill uses to punish James occurs through Maria, a seductively dressed but otherwise uncannily identical version of his deceased spouse. Maria is killed three times throughout the game, forcing James to vicariously relive the death of his wife. The first and third deaths are at the hands of ‘Pyramid Heads,’ humanoid monsters wearing butcher’s aprons and large red helmets shaped like elongated pyramids. SH2 indicates that these creatures are a remnant of Silent Hill’s past, used to punished sinners. For the second death, James encounters a revived Maria in a cell-like room, but he cannot reach her as she is locked behind metal bars. Once James finds an access point, he discovers her corpse lying supine on a bed bearing visible signs of violence—a direct reference to Mary’s death. In these cases, Maria’s executions are vicarious punishments directed toward James.

Other characters in SH2 have been drawn to the town to suffer for their transgressions. Angela Orosco is forced to confront the crime of killing her abusive father. Eddie Dombrowski is called to Silent Hill for killing a dog and shooting its owner in the leg as a result of pent-up rage. The only character that James meets along the way not connected in some way to a punishment is Laura, a young girl left undisturbed by the town’s various monstrosities. As described in Lost Memories, “to her the town appears to be normal” because she has committed no crimes and therefore “does not hold any darkness in her heart” (Konami, 2003: 47). For this reason, no punishment is enacted by the town.

Pursuing vengeance

Not only does Silent Hill enact retribution against those drawn to the town but many characters within the series are driven by a desire for revenge. In fact, every game in the series, with the exception of Shattered Memories, features characters or monsters in some way motivated by vengeance. For example, the purgatorial state of the town throughout the series is in part the result of the vengeful anger of Alessa, a character featured or referenced in SH1, SH3, and Origins. In SH1, the player learns that Alessa was sacrificed in a botched religious ceremony to birth a “god” which resulted in the town becoming “devoured by darkness” (Dahlia Gillespie, SH1). The process leaves her trapped in Silent Hill and imbued with deific powers that warp the town. She uses these abilities to facilitate the protagonist’s—Harry’s—mission, as a way to enact vengeance against those who harmed her and to break free from her torment.

In other games, characters’ quests for revenge are more straightforward. In SH3, a direct sequel to the first game, Harry Mason is murdered by a member of Silent Hill’s cult. The remainder of the game focuses on his daughter, Heather, and her pursuit of the murderer and her religious order. Downpour’s Officer Cunningham hunts Murphy—the protagonist—throughout the game. Revenge is the objective, as she believes Murphy is responsible for the assault and subsequent death of her father, Officer Coleridge. Cunningham eventually learns that the corrupt Officer Sewel framed Murphy for the crime. The final scene closes as she meets with Sewel with a gun held behind her back, implying imminent payback. ³

On executions and torture

Beyond the imposition of retribution by the monstrous town or the pursuit of revenge by various characters, the omnipresence of retribution in Silent Hill is further evinced by the widespread appearance of execution and torture—punishments which inflict violence upon the body for transgressions committed (Foucault, 1977: 8)—throughout every game in the series with the exception of Shattered Memories. ⁴ This abject violence is typically implied through blood, body parts, and artifacts of punishment (like torture devices) rather than witnessed directly, and triggers revulsion and apprehension in the player. Silent Hill fans were likely first introduced to punitive violence in the opening scene of the first game. As Harry Mason is frantically searching for his daughter through a serpentine alley, sirens blare and the world descends into darkness. With only the illumination provided by his lighter, Harry presses forward as the alley gives way to a corridor flanked by chain link fencing and lined with barbed wire. At the end of the path, he comes across a crucified and desiccated corpse bound to a bloodied fence. In their panic, the player tries to maneuver Harry’s escape before he is waylaid and rendered unconscious by monstrous figures.

SH3 provides examples as well. In one occurrence, Heather enters a room filled with restraint tables, cages suspended from the ceiling, and a thumb-biter laying on a table. As she stares at a bloodied table, she declares, “I don’t even want to think about what this platform was used for” (a declaration mirroring the researcher’s own thoughts). Downpour is similarly littered with executions and tortures. For instance, Murphy—a convict—encounters the bodies of his fellow prisoners throughout the town, which often bear signs of mutilation and torture. Certain monsters featured in Homecoming specifically embody forms of torture and execution as well, to create a monstrous impurity that forewarns of violence. A monster named ‘schism,’ for instance, evokes the pendulum, a torture device involving a slowly descending swinging blade suspended above a captive body. The monster attacks by swinging its bladed head at the protagonist. Asphyxia, a boss monster reminiscent of a centipede made of human bodies, is encountered in an otherworldly gas chamber. Two hands extend from the creature’s face and cover its mouth. Considering its name, location, and mannerisms, the boss embodies, among other things, death through asphyxiation, like that experienced in a gas chamber. In fact, the monster is intended to represent the sacrifice of a child killed through suffocation. Even the Pyramid Head monsters are described in both SH2 and Homecoming as “executioners.”

Religious retribution

The Silent Hill series also regularly deploys religion as a horrific theme throughout the series (though Shattered Memories again poses an exception). ⁵ Certain characters and in-game documents describe forms of divine or demonic retribution for sins committed. For instance, references are made throughout these games to a religious cult called The Order which seeks to punish sinners and achieve eternal paradise. As previously mentioned, the events of Silent Hill were triggered by a religious ritual gone awry. The culmination of Alessa’s pain and Dahlia’s manipulation of Harry is to usher in “the day of reckoning”—a holy occasion where sinners are punished and those deemed worthy are led into a spiritual paradise. In SH3, a direct sequel to the first game of the series, numerous references are made to religious forms of punishment. In one instance, a monstrous Leonard, father of the central antagonist, Claudia, proclaims “death to all who turn their backs on God!” before attacking Heather. In Downpour, a nun (presumably of The Order) rebukes Murphy as she quotes scripture, stating, “There were those who dwelt in darkness and in the shadow of death, prisoners in misery and chains, because they had rebelled against the word of God.”

Not only does religious punitivity seep into the narratives of the Silent Hill series, but the player is constantly reminded of such a connection through visual design. For instance, In SH3, the power of the town corrupts churches and religious altars by incorporating prison imagery. In one instance, Heather confronts Claudia as she intends to force Heather to give birth to the ‘god’ of the town. Claudia stands in front of an altar flanked by rows of metal bars, giving the appearance that the altar is itself a prison cell (Figure 1). In many of the games, like SH1 and SH4, bodies are arranged to purposefully invoke crucifixion, a form of punishment linked to Christianity. A prominent example is the abominable self-crucifixion of the serial killer Walter Sullivan as he attempted to complete a religious ritual called the ‘21 Sacraments.’ Silent Hill thus uncannily blurs divine purity and monstrous impurity through by invoking religion and punishment in tandem.

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Figure 1.

Claudia Wolf stands in front of a prison-like altar (Silent Hill 3).

In sum, Silent Hill horrifically uses retributive punishment to drive its narrative and visual design. Silent Hill itself is a monstrous entity, an unheimlich town which would be idyllic if it were not tainted by visual reminders of tortuous violence gone by and corrupted by a malicious will which seeks to punish those who offend a perverse moral order. The few souls left wandering its streets move with vengeful intent. Even divinity is perverted by punishment. Before discussing the implications of such monstrous retribution, this analysis explores another form of punishment horrifically ubiquitous throughout the game, confinement.

Confinement

Imprisoned by environmental design

Aside from the pursuit of retribution or revenge, there are other punitive narratives at work in the Silent Hill series. Confinement—the containment or monitoring of bodies in space—is a recurring theme throughout as well. In many ways, Silent Hill itself is a prison. The player is given the sense that they are trapped in the town, cut off from the rest of the world and subject to the whims of a supernatural force. One method the game uses to invoke this sensation is the linear gameplay structure. In these games the player progresses from one point to another with relatively little deviation. Unlike ‘sandbox’ games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto) which allow players to freely roam their environments, Silent Hill tends to steer the player from objective to objective—a feature endemic to the survival horror genre. Downpour presents one notable exception to this rule as the bulk of the game takes place in a more open version of Silent Hill. While the player has some freedom to roam the streets of the town, however, they are still forced to progress linearly from one objective to another, only deviating to complete the relatively inconsequential (and optional) side quests. The protagonist and player, however, are made explicitly aware that they are trapped in the town.

The series further invokes a sense of confinement through the use of weather and lighting effects that limit the field of view. The original Silent Hill made use of fog because of hardware limitations on the original Sony PlayStation console but the visual effect was so effective at generating sensations of isolation and uncertainty that it became a staple of the series (Figure 2). Each iteration of the game uses fog, snow, rain, or darkness to enclose the avatar and invoke impressions of confinement and even claustrophobia in the player.

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Figure 2.

Harry Mason standing in the fog (Silent Hill 1).

The Silent Hill series further intensifies feelings of entrapment through the rampant use of environmental barriers. As the player wanders the town, their in-game avatars are continually flanked by fences, brick and concrete walls, and barbed or concertina wire—far more than would be found in a typical small American town. Players frequently stumble upon collapsed streets that descend into fog or darkness, as seen in Figure 3 which shows Downpour’s main character peering over the edge of a demolished road. Further, storefronts, houses, apartments, and other buildings are often boarded up, taped off, shuttered, or otherwise inaccessible throughout the town. In the relatively few buildings the player can enter, most of the doors are jammed. Other doors are locked which the player must open by finding a key or solving a particular puzzle. If the player decides to proceed down a street or through a door outside of the parameters of the immediate objective, the game frequently forces the player to turn around or otherwise prevents them from moving forward until they accomplish the next designated task. These obstructions also frequently invoke prisons directly by incorporating prison bars and cages in the game environments. As a case in point, Figure 4 shows the protagonist of Silent Hill 2 encountering metal bars obstructing his passage through an apartment building hallway—an architectural feature atypical for such a structure. Prison imagery thus appears to abjectly infiltrate and disrupt the game environments, frequently appearing in otherwise unreasonable places, as if to remind the player that they—via the in-game avatar—are ensnared.

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Figure 3.

Murphy Pendleton peers over the edge of a street that has collapsed into nothingness (Silent Hill: Downpour).

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Figure 4.

James Sunderland encounters metal bars obstructing his path through an apartment building hallway (Silent Hill 2).

Prisons and jails are also featured as playable levels in SH2, SH4, Homecoming, and Downpour. These environments largely reflect American and British prison architectural designs. Common themes in these levels are dilapidated and rusting facilities that are abandoned save a few characters and monsters (though often far fewer creatures than found in many other areas). When monsters do appear, they break through barriers and slip through cracks that would be impenetrable for the player. For instance, Homecoming includes both a jail and a prison as playable locations. In both locations, Alex must occasionally confront monsters that sneak in through the holes and crevices of the crumbling building or burst through its walls and locked doors (Figure 5 shows one such encounter with a creature that entered the room through a hole in the penitentiary’s ceiling). The only signs of human life in the prison, apart from the appearance of two supporting characters, are gleaned through the occasional note scribbled on scraps of paper or graffiti left on cell walls.

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Figure 5.

Alex Shepherd confronts a monster in the Overlook Penitentiary (Silent Hill: Homecoming).

Silent Hill games also incorporate prison imagery into the environment through ‘otherworld’ levels that involve transformations in the landscape from unsettlingly purgatorial to outright nightmarish. At designated points in these games (with the exception of SH4), the distant whine of sirens sounds and the world transitions into an extradimensional otherworld. While each game approaches this otherworld differently, common elements include filth, rust, unidentifiable bodies strewn about, and pervasive darkness. The otherworld also often includes chains, cages, and restraint beds, among other forms of punitive debris (excluding Shattered Memories, which instead features frozen environments and creatures representing psychological repression). These scenes are therefore not only revolting but are abjectly “breached” by carceral components (Valier, 2002). In SH1, for instance, a transition to the otherworld occurs in the Midwich Elementary School. Tile floors are replaced with chain link fencing. Cages are suspended from the ceiling, some of which contain faceless, desiccated corpses. Hallways are obstructed by chain link fences. Darkness is pervasive. In one of Homecoming’s otherworld transitions, paint peels from the walls to reveal rusted metal beams and fencing. Bathroom stalls are transformed into cages. Downpour has perhaps the most visceral otherworld transitions, which starkly incorporate prison imagery as much of the game alludes to Murphy’s incarceration. Iron bars, cages, barbed wire, and other prison architectural features are omnipresent. In these cases, and others, the veneer of one reality is removed and replaced with a nightmare. Every use of the otherworld takes a previously ‘safe’ environment—like a school, hospital, or apartment building—and merges it with elements borrowed from industrial factories and prisons. As the town becomes more nightmarish, it also becomes more prison-like.

The environments of Silent Hill are thus distinctly detentive in design. The landscapes are curated to control the player through the linear structure, barriers, camera angles, and other mechanisms in a manner that disciplines the player via the in-game avatar (Foucault, 1977). Further, the visual aesthetic of these environments is frequently encroached upon by prison aesthetics which uncannily blur the boundaries between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ (Fiddler, 2013) and abjectly disrupt the landscape like wounds blotting a complexion (Kristeva, 1982 [1980]). The result is a visual and ludic experience engineered to create intense feelings of enclosure, isolation, and horror in the player.

Narrative entrapment

Not only do the mechanical and visual aspects of the game contain the player but many of the stories and character arcs in the series hinge on confinement. For example, in Silent Hill, Alessa Gillespie has tremendous power to shape Silent Hill, and yet the ritual enacted against her has left her body a charred husk bound to wheelchairs and hospital beds. She cannot die. As explained in Lost Memories (Konami, 2003), Alessa is effectively immortal because of an unborn ‘god’ that resides within her. As such, she is trapped in her own body, potentially for eternity. Her mother, Dahlia, states in the climax of the game that “Alessa has been trapped in an endless nightmare from which she never wakens.” Such bodily imprisonment and suffering is a key motivating factor behind Alessa’s supernatural actions, as confirmed by one of the game developers, Hiroyuki Owaku: “the principle behind her behavior is that she desires to escape from suffering” (Konami, 2003: 88). Such motivations propel her actions throughout the events of SH3 as well, where “the immortal Alessa repeats an infinite loop of birth and death” (Konami, 2003: 96).

Perhaps the most prominent example of a confinement narrative emerges in SH4 which features Henry Townshend, an everyman character who awakens one day to find himself trapped inside his apartment. The front door is chained shut with the words “don’t go out” handwritten in red on its surface. His windows are sealed and unbreakable. No one on the outside can hear his cries for help. In perhaps the truest sense of the term, Henry’s home has become unheimlich as his home also becomes his cage—the familiar rendered unfamiliar (Fiddler, 2013). A hole eventually appears in Henry’s bathroom wall leading to a tunnel that transports him into the purgatorial town of Silent Hill. Throughout the game, Henry can only exit his apartment into the isolated areas of the town. As uncovered over the course of the game, he is a prisoner of Walter Sullivan, a serial killer intricately linked to the apartment and the various otherworldly locations Henry is transported to in Silent Hill. The entire plot of this game revolves around Henry’s entrapment and his struggle to break free. In this manner, the game design not only makes the player feel as if they are entrapped within the horrific town, but various stories within the series hinge on confinement as well. The narratological appears to parallel the ludological.

Surveillance

An element that evinces Silent Hill’s preoccupation with confinement through both narrative and gameplay design is the series’ use of surveillance. Surveillance is intimately linked to confinement, as such strategies often involve the monitoring of bodies in space for the purposes of control (real or imagined). Silent Hill is rife with surveillant mechanisms designed to disorient the player and engender feelings that they are under supervision. One of the most obvious invocations of surveillance is through the ludological use of dislocated and stilted camera angles which “often resembles electronic monitoring technologies more than narrative cinema” (Kirkland, 2009c: 120). Cameras shift to jarring and Hitchcockian angles to give the player the feeling that they are somehow detached, as if they are intruding or surveilling the character. Lost Memories (Konami, 2003: 90) states that “[i]f one pays attention to the camerawork, one might notice that the way it shifts to the protagonist’s point of view at times expresses a sense of confusion and anxiety.” For instance, while investigating a room in SH4’s prison level (a panopticon), the camera stares directly down at the protagonist as if the player is awkwardly lurking overhead (Figure 6).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Henry Townshend reads graffiti in a panopticon prison cell (Silent Hill 4: The Room).

While camera angles create a sense of disorientation in the player, there are multiple moments throughout the series in which the characters themselves invade the privacy of others. For example, in SH4 one of the only exposures the protagonist has with the outside world is through the peephole in his door, his windows, and a voyeuristic hole in his wall that gazes directly into his neighbor’s bedroom. He watches the various comings and goings of his neighbors while he is helpless to interact. In the game’s panopticon, the player occasionally glimpses a shadowy body moving past the surveillance windows in the cells, with the steady clopping of their shoes echoing against the concrete. The empty cells occasionally bear messages left by prisoners expressing feelings of fear and oppression as a result of constant surveillance. In one cell, for example, Henry finds a note next to a noose that states “I’m sick of being watched.” In another, “I want to hide. But I can’t” is scrawled on the wall of the cell in red (see Figure 6). Throughout the series, any time the player surveils others they are reminded that they are not in control—that events are unraveling around them in which they are relatively insignificant players.

There is a broader metaphysical feeling of surveillance pervasive throughout these games as well. The malicious supernatural powers inhabiting the town appear preoccupied with the protagonists, monitoring their every move. The world may change as a result of their actions and subject the characters to new trials and tribulations. Messages may be left and scenery may tailor itself to reflect their past crimes and misdeeds. Thus, while the characters face powers seemingly beyond their control and understanding, there is some sense that these powers are scrutinizing their actions. As DJ Ricks forebodes in Downpour, “you don’t know who might be listening, you understand?” Thus surveillance—in one capacity or another—appears as a core mechanism of both the story and structure of the games.

Monstrous confinement

Beyond narratives and environmental design, the theme of confinement is also embodied by various monsters that blight the landscape of Silent Hill. For example, certain monsters bear restraints like those used in historical forms of torture or within mental asylums (which were historically dungeon- or prison-like). SH2’s and Origin’s ‘patient demon’ (or ‘straitjacket’), a grotesque figure wrapped in flesh that approximates the wearing of a restraint garment associated with asylums, is one such example. In another illustration, Homecoming features two monsters bound in leather restraints, including the ‘siam’—a hideous amalgamation of two bodies (previously featured in Figure 5)—and the ‘lurker’ whose legs are secured together in a fashion roughly resembling a tail.

More prevalent, however, is the use of restraints for ‘boss’ monsters—tougher enemies that usually occur toward the end of a segmented game environment. For instance, the final boss of SH3 is attached to the wall and secured through leather flaps. In Origins, Travis fights a monstrous manifestation of his father that is chained and caged to the wall. These monsters are restrained and yet still post a threat to the protagonist. Thus, while confinement appears totalizing, such limits appear untrustworthy.

To summarize, Silent Hill invokes horror through an environmental design that disciplines the actions of the player and their avatar in a manner reminiscent of Foucault’s (1977) descriptions of modern/post-modern punishment methods. Further, environments and monsters are hideously amalgamated with prisons and other machinations of confinement as a method of revolting the player as well as creating a sense of danger. The end result is a gameplay experience where the player feels burdened or even oppressed—that they too are trapped within the horrific world of Silent Hill. Though the player can escape such revolting experiences through judicious use of the ‘off’ switch on their console or computer, the abject nature of the experience also draws them into the game (Kristeva, 1982 [1980]). The player thus may seek release and entrapment simultaneously.

Discussion

Though Silent Hill’s use of retribution and confinement contributes to an unnerving experience for the player through mechanisms like the unheimlich, abjection, and monstrosity, cultural criminology and Gothic criminology suggest that these themes may also be horrifying because they provide unnerving reflections of the social and cultural context in which they were produced. Silent Hill is a product of two cultures. As Picard (2009: 100) explains, the games emerged from the mutual inter-cultural transmission of horror tropes and themes across the Pacific: “survival horror games are Americanized Japanese horror products, both in their themes and characterizations, as well as in their visual aspects.” While perhaps strange to some, this thematic and narrative intermingling is hardly surprising considering the reciprocal importation and consumption of media between the two countries. Further, both the US and Japan experienced similar social shifts during Silent Hill’s early years when it developed its core aesthetic and themes (the late 1990s into the 2000s). As well-executed horror media usually reflect predominant social and cultural anxieties, perhaps one of the reasons the series was so well received across both countries is because of a shared constellation of social woes given life within its horrific content.

During the heyday of Silent Hill, America was undergoing rapid social change stemming from globalization, the rise of the service-based economy, the dissolution of national borders, and other factors (Young, 2007). These shifts rocked the labor market and, combined with a 24-hour news cycle mired in doom and gloom, encouraged a sense of precarity among many in the working and middle classes. Young (2007: 13) argues that many persons in these circumstances experience “vertigo” as a result of such shifts, a sensation that stems from “insecurities of status and of economic position” involving a “feeling of unsteadiness [that] permeates the structure of society.”

Amidst such insecurity, the public grasps for stability. “The insecure citizen,” according to Young (2007: 10), “seeks to escape the vertigo of the late modern world by reaching out for strong lines of identity and grasps out at difference.” They thus seek out the other—an abstract yet individuated population—on to whom their anxieties can be heaped. One result of this process is that we turn toward institutions of control to insulate us from our insecurities. Under these circumstances the US has seen its prison populations soar since the 1980s to unprecedented levels (Kaeble et al., 2015), schools have become increasingly securitized (Schept et al., 2015), and the police now resemble military forces more than peace officers (Kappeler and Kraska, 2015), to name a few such trends. While the US is no stranger to extreme control and punishment measures, the contemporary social and political landscape has become marred by what Garland (2001) describes as a “culture of control.”

Japan has experienced similar shifts. In his analysis of the Hikikomori phenomenon—Japanese youths who withdraw from social and economic life—Furlong (2008) points out that in the late 1990s, Japanese society experienced rapid social changes that rendered traditional avenues of integration and ascension questionable. With weak institutions of social support and an education system that offered narrower opportunities to enter the labor market, the Japanese, particularly young adults, may internalize such social failings and experience a kind of anomie (Durkheim, 2006 [1897]) or, perhaps, vertigo (Young, 2007).

Under such social transformations and subsequent disorientations, Japanese perceptions of crime and crime control policy began to parallel those of Americans. During the late 1990s and into the 2000s, elevated fear of crime and worries over law enforcement corruption and ineffectiveness were widespread (Hamai and Ellis, 2006). As a result, Japan experienced multiple moral panics that fueled:

a new popular authoritarianism among the Japanese public’s and sentencers’ attitudes, which has produced a rapid shift from a posited existing re-integrative and informal notion of criminal justice, to one which is more formal, retributive and indeed, looks more like Garland’s (2001) “penal welfare state.” (Hamai and Ellis, 2006: 160)

Like Americans, the Japanese may have been primed for such attitudes through their country’s history of retributive theater and folklore, particularly those surrounding tales of vengeful spirits (Harper, 2010) and brutal punishments such as those deployed by the Tokugawa (Botsman, 2005). Much like in the US, Japan saw an increase in its prison populations during this millennial period—one that did not correlate to its crime rates—though the country’s incarceration rates remained low compared to most other countries (Hamai and Ellis, 2006). ⁶ Thus in both the US and Japan there appears to be a connection between social change and increased public demand for crime control.

Great horror not only frightens and reviles but taps into our collective consciousness and provides a vehicle through which to exercise (or exorcise) our anxieties (Picart and Greek, 2003, 2007, 2009). Its monstrous content provides a grotesque reflection of historical circumstances (Poole, 2011), as well as disturbing our sense of identity and reality (Kristeva (1982 [1980]; Spittle, 2011). Silent Hill is a product of two countries coping with a sense of vertigo and mired in cultures of control. The series may therefore resonate across both in part because of the series’ incorporation of punitive themes and imagery which represent and interrogate shared social maladies.

In this spirit, Silent Hill’s monstrous retribution may reflect concerns over crime and problematize our collective lust for vengeful justice. To illustrate, though the murder of James’ wife in SH2 is morally repugnant to most and therefore deserving of punishment, players become unnerved and even terrified by the monstrous nature of the retribution enacted by the town upon the protagonist. Punishment is given a horrific countenance. Further, various characters throughout Silent Hill become monstrous through their pursuit of retribution. In SH3, Heather seeks vengeance for the murder of her father. Unbeknownst to her, the hatred she fosters nourishes a monstrous deity growing inside of her, a spiritual infection that displays visible symptoms intermittently throughout the game. During the final confrontation with the murderer, Heather’s skin undulates with red lines and she begins to gag and cough as the monster within her threatens to emerge. In her pursuit of retribution, she is birthing a monster and, vicariously, becoming monstrous herself. In both Homecoming and Downpour, if the player chooses to be vindictive or otherwise retributive throughout these games then they may transform into a ‘Pyramid Head’ or ‘Bogeyman’ in optional game endings, thereby literally becoming monsters.

The use of religious themes and imagery throughout the games similarly reveals a moral contradiction surrounding retribution. References are made to ‘paradise’ and ‘heaven,’ yet the spiritual manifestations resulting from the pursuit of these ends are undeniably monstrous. The seeking of spiritual purity by the religious cult of Silent Hill, for instance, is uncannily blurred with monstrous impurity (Carroll, 1990). In this capacity, the punishments dispensed are supposedly divine in nature, yet appear demonic to the protagonists and the player. While characters like Dahlia Gillespie (SH1), Claudia Wolf (SH3), Leonard Wolf (SH3), and Margaret Holloway (Homecoming) call for the punishment of sinners concomitant with divine spiritual ascention of some sort, their religious endeavors manifest as hellish monstrosities and atrocities. The Silent Hill series thus points toward an underlying monstrosity of punishment—even when we enact it for supposedly divine purposes it manifests as something more sinister. Much like the arguments made by classical theorists like Beccaria and Bentham, Silent Hill suggests in a Gothic fashion an inherent evil in punishment. The series not only problematizes the pursuit of punishment but also alludes to the ubiquity of monstrous retribution evinced by the pervasive presence of tormented corpses, body parts, and torture devices.

Perhaps Silent Hill thus signals a concern that we have ourselves become monsters in pursuit of carceral vengeance. Like the mob that pursued Frankenstein’s monster with torches and pitchforks, those driven to destroy the monstrous risk becoming monsters themselves. According to Taylor (2009: 49), “Gothic texts transgress boundaries to question, define and redefine them.” Silent Hill interrogates the boundaries between righteous purity and monstrous impurity in the quest for retribution. Punishment therefore has an abject quality to it—we are simultaneously drawn to its cathartic promise and repelled by its monstrous presence (Kristeva, 1982 [1980]).

Beyond monstrous retribution, the intense focus on confinement in the Silent Hill series reveals social anxieties concerning creeping institutions of control. One key mechanism survival horror uses to frighten players is to invoke feelings of insignificance and helplessness—the traits underpinning what HP Lovecraft called “cosmic horror.” While the series is still a video game and must therefore afford some control to the player, many of the elements are engineered to create feelings of alienation and futility: the gameplay is linear, much of the environment is overtly barricaded or otherwise off limits to the player, seemingly arbitrary puzzles litter the town and its buildings, the camera constantly jerks to angles that invoke feelings of being watched, and allusions are frequently made to unseen metaphysical forces manipulating the events around the player. Further, prisons and jails are directly conjured across the landscape through the use of barbed or concertina wire, fencing, stone and brick walls, metal bars, prison cells, and even jails and prisons as playable levels. These elements are carceral not only for their visual aesthetic but because they discipline the player and their avatar within virtual spaces, which engenders feelings of isolation and powerlessness by limiting the ludic experience and visually signaling diminished autonomy and control (Foucault, 1977).

Silent Hill’s Otherworld provides the most potent examples of punitive and carceral encroachment in the visual landscape. This dark, transitory, extra-dimensional otherworld amalgamates seemingly benign locations like schools, hospitals, hotels, and others with both industrial factories and prisons. In this manner, Silent Hill becomes not only monstrous through its treatment of its denizens, but also visibly monstrous through what Carroll (1990) calls “fusion.” For Carroll (1990: 43), “a fusion figure is a composite that unites attributes held to be categorically distinct and/or at odds in the cultural scheme of things in unambiguously one, spatio-temporally discrete entity.” The otherworld locations of Silent Hill blur the boundaries between institutions and buildings we might typically view as categorically distinct, which upsets our sensibilities and thus renders the locations horrific. In a Freudian sense, the otherworld may be seen as uncanny in that it problematizes the boundaries between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ areas, similar to Fiddler’s (2013) descriptions of the home invasion genre of cinematic horror.

The encroachment of prisons and punishment across the landscape of Silent Hill also parallels the pervasiveness of the culture of control that has arisen in both the United States and Japan. In a sense these societies are themselves descending into an Otherworld mired in darkness and uncertainty where prisons invade more and more of our daily existence. Just as the Gothic is said to dramatize “a modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse” (Valier, 2002: 320), particularly those “that define the normative power structures” (Taylor, 2009: 49), Silent Hill reflects blurring distinctions between crime control and other social institutions, a dissolution that similarly manifests in the lived experiences of those under late modernity (Garland, 2001; Young, 2007). That so many core horror elements featured in Silent Hill incorporate features of prisons, tortures, executions, and surveillance is no coincidence; after all, which elements better provide a horrific verisimilitude reflecting diminished autonomy and social isolation than those related to prison? In this capacity, Silent Hill invokes horrific carceral geographies (Moran, 2013) or emotional geographies of confinement.

Further, while the player is made to feel that their confinement is almost total, these rules do not seem to apply to others, particularly the monsters of Silent Hill. As mentioned previously, various monsters in these games are constricted or bound in some capacity. Despite such restraints, these monsters still pose a significant threat to the protagonists. SH2’s patient demon, for instance, appears constricted in restraints made of flesh reminiscent of a straightjacket. Despite such ambulatory limitations, the demon can spray acid and, when prone, scurry quickly across the floor and attack the protagonist. Such bindings thus appear inadequate to suppress the danger posed. Though the player is subjected to various forms of control, the monsters appear relatively unhindered by such restrictions.

The uneasy differential effectiveness of control is further evinced by the presence (or, rather, absence) of monsters within prison environments. In SH2, SH4, Homecoming, and Downpour, comparatively few monsters lurk the prison halls relative to other game locations. Most players might expect that a sinister and dark prison should have more monsters inside as these facilities are designed to contain large groups of criminals. Rather than feel comforted by this absence, the player experiences a tension as something terrible might lurk around each and every corner, cloying at the edges of the sensory field—a “horror vacui” or fear of emptiness emerges (Soderman, 2015). The absence creates a visceral presence in the imagination—if the monsters or criminals are not in the prison, then they must be somewhere. In some games, like Homecoming, monsters may appear suddenly, crawling through holes in the walls or sometimes breaking through barriers that were impassable to the player. The prisons, therefore, seem to bear no restrictions for the monsters and yet the player seems helpless to do anything other than proceed along a linear path. There is thus an anxiety produced by the differential effectiveness of control mechanisms throughout these games. The player and their avatar are railroaded along a set course through these buildings while monsters can circumvent or even obliterate architectural barriers. Confinement thus appears total for the player but unreliable for monstrous others.

This use of confinement as a horror theme reveals a social anxiety stemming from a perceptual contradiction. Both US and Japanese citizens regularly confront uncertainties in their lives which create feelings of declining social, political, and economy control—that someone else is pulling the strings. Further, institutions of control creep further and further into everyday life, partially in response to public demand for security. Yet the threats never seem to go away. Fear of crime remains high regardless of decreases in crime rates. Monstrous others thus appear to retain control in the public imagination and are believed to exploit the system and victimize the public seemingly unimpeded by law enforcement, the military, social welfare, or other institutions. Silent Hill taps into this anxiety by subjecting the player to forms of control that do not seem to apply to others, particularly monstrous creatures. As horror/Gothic texts “negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformations and crises” (Hurley, 1996: 5, as cited in Taylor, 2009: 57), it is perhaps unsurprising that Silent Hill incorporates such punitive and carceral elements in a time blemished by crises of control.

Conclusion

Silent Hill is thus more than a game series. In a cultural criminological sense, these games create fictional worlds of punishment and imprisonment that blur and intermingle with late modern crime control and punitive ideologies (Ferrell et al., 2015). Through their depictions of monstrous forms of retribution, the games gesticulate toward the moral contradiction that the pursuit of monsters threatens to become monstrous itself; that attempts to punish wrongdoers carry with them the vestiges of ‘evil.’ Further, Silent Hill represents the ubiquity of punishment and control in late modern society which coincides with widespread ‘vertiginous’ feelings of ontological, economic, and interpersonal insecurity (Young, 2007). In this manner, the games invoke a sensation familiar to many—a uneasiness created by a sense that our lives are out of our control, subject to the whims of outside forces and institutions, and that dangerous others are immune from such effects and are thus free to offend or abuse the system at will. Silent Hill embodies and reflects these social anxieties through monstrous representation.

Video games continue to dominate ever larger portions of consumer attention and market shares. While such games are often derided as ‘just entertainment,’ we should remember that such entertainment can be horrific and hostile. Horror writer Clive Barker (2009: 2) states, “we are so often guilty of assuming that the experience which provides pleasure is likely to be benign” and reminds us that “the spectacles in the Coliseum were not benign.” These games are more than interactive forms of digital play—they represent, distort, and propagate cultural messages and ideology (Ferrell et al., 2015). Scholars of cultural criminology would do well to explore the medium of video games as a critical site of social and cultural inquiry. As demonstrated in this analysis, the Silent Hill series contains horrific insights concerning social disorientation, and the proliferation of institutions of control with their corresponding configuration of cultural and ideological apparatuses of authority. Researchers should embrace this late modern medium to understand late modern social change and its corresponding anxieties and consequences.