Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto says ‘as the series progressed, I felt that the essence of Japanese horror was lost’

While the big news out of Konami’s Press Start event was the welcome announcement that Bloober Team is remaking the original Silent Hill, there was also a substantial behind-the-scenes segment on the upcoming Silent Hill F, which we’ll see a lot sooner than a remake Konami didn’t even have footage of.

Silent Hill F is a prequel set in Showa-era Japan. Which isn’t the first time Silent Hill has left the town it’s named after—the opening of Silent Hill 3, for instance—but is taking a much further trip, all the way to a small town called Ebisugaoka.

“Silent Hill was a series that fused the essence of western horror and Japanese horror,” series producer Motoi Okamoto said, “but as the series progressed, I felt that the essence of Japanese horror was lost. I began to feel a desire to create a Silent Hill with 100% essence of Japanese-style horror.”

Part of what makes Silent Hill unique is that it’s inspired by so much American horror—the books of Stephen King, movies like Jacob’s Ladder—but viewed through a Japanese lens. It has streets named after Dean Koontz, Robert Bloch, Richard Bachman, and Ira Levin, but also borrows from the books of Ryū Murakami and Kōbō Abe, and the monsters you encounter there and the otherworld you travel to have designs that feel like a Japanese take on Clive Barker via David Lynch.

“The hallmark of Japanese horror is not simply grotesqueness but the coexistence of beauty and the disturbing,” Okamoto went on to say. “We are creating this title with the concept ‘find the beauty in terror’.”

Al Yang, game director at Silent Hill F development studio Neobards, elaborated on that. “As a key concept in Silent Hill F is the idea of beauty in terror. We created our visual designs to have a distinct uneasiness to them, but also have a horrific charm that would make it so you just couldn’t stop staring.” Those designs are based on concepts by Japanese artist Kera, who has worked on Spirit Hunter: NG and Magic: The Gathering.

Given how poorly received most of the Silent Hill games made by American studios have been—especially Homecoming, with its ex-Special Forces protagonist making a sharp contrast to the ordinary people previously featured in the series—having a sequel that’s as Japanese as it can be makes sense. Though I might miss oddities like having a school level based on visual reference taken from Kindergarten Cop.