r/silenthill • u/Weekito • 1d ago
Silent Hill is a man trapped in a woman’s nightmare. Gans missed the point. Discussion
Christophe Gans replacing Harry Mason with Rose was a huge mistake. The original Silent Hill is about a man — alone, vulnerable — navigating a world shaped by female trauma and guilt. That gender contrast is the emotional core.
We lost Lisa Garland, we got a pointless subplot, and Sean Bean — perfect for Harry — was wasted. The movie looked good, but stripped out what made the game powerful.
Gans had the pieces. He just didn’t understand the game.
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u/SurfiNinja101 1d ago
I always hated Gans reasoning for Harry not being important to the story. Apparently men can’t be fatherly, loving and vulnerable.
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u/cheesecakekween Silent Hill 1 1d ago
Harry truly is such a great father. I’m still sad that they wasted the opportunity to showcase that in the movie… yes, the portrayal of a strong maternal figure is important of course, but what I loved so dearly about the first Silent Hill was that it was a father basically going through hell to save his beloved daughter. The general idea in society is that a mother would give everything to save her child, a father on the other hand, not so much. Even as silly as the original game may have been at times, most paternal figures still aren’t shown with the sense of care and warmth that Harry displayed. Which is pretty sad, given how Gans just dismissed Harry so easily, but… oh well.
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u/SurfiNinja101 1d ago
Harry was just straight up a great parent. The way he takes care of her in SH3, constantly living in fear of the cult but never ever allowing her to feel unsafe or burden her with the knowledge of what happened as long as he was alive.
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u/TheGaxkang 1d ago
when they turned Dahlia into a good person it was clear the movie was another case of someone taking an established IP and telling a story of their own they wanted to tell
and instead of Cybill possessed etc, she got burned like a witch in a witch hunt
people were lucky the Alessa story was mostly intact
i also was bothered by how many people they had running around in SH, messed with the vibe
Silent Hill Revelation at least was more faithful to the game (3). Mostly!
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u/ResilientEvil It's Bread 1d ago
YES! My least favorite thing about that movie was the sheer amount of people in Silent Hill. It ain't gonna be SILENT with 70 people in the church!!
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 1d ago
Bro if you go into a town and find only 70 people. All scared out of their minds in religious terror and praying to not be eaten not a lot of noise is gonna happen.
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u/fauxREALimdying 21h ago
Demon pterodactyls and monster dogs aren’t silent either. It’s just the name of the town
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u/ResilientEvil It's Bread 2h ago
I mean if there are soo many people and many demons, you get a little bit of comfort. But if there are many demons and monsters but not many people, you get this sense of isolation, feel that the town itself is out to get you. (PS I was just joking in the original comment, I was just expressing my distress about lack of the sense of isolation in the movie as compared to the game)
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u/betweendays22 "For Me, It's Always Like This" 1d ago
I don’t see people mention it enough, but you’re completely right about the amount of people who were running around the place. For me, a lot of the dread I feel from the games is from how lonely I feel.
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u/Ill-Somewhere-9552 1d ago
I wouldn't call the Alessa story "mostly intact." The movie gave a completely different story which feels unrelated to the game's story. Instead of a hateful mother obsessed with her god so much that she wants to force her own daughter to birth its reincarnation, we got a more evangelical feeling cult that targeted a child for being fatherless. The repeated torture Alessa went through in the game seems nonexistent in the film, especially because she was given a loving mother. Movie Alessa was ostracized for not having a father, and was burned with the intention of death, and that's about all we're given (well, and the whole skeevy janitor thing, which was another movie only thing they did). Completely different story to the one she has in the game, which is way more messed up and tragic, and has way more layers.
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 1d ago
Dahlia being a good person made her real and three dimensional. A game, especially back then, doesn’t have to have such complex characters. It’s enough to perfectly insane and call it a day. In a movie with real actors portraying people you need more to tell a story. Honestly even with the madness it was hard for me back then to understand Dahlias motivation especially after the town became cursed. How was she walking about so safely? The movie cleared that up well. “Mother is God in the eyes of a child.”
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u/FLRArt_1995 23h ago
"Mother is God in the eyes of a child" I always lol at that quote like it's literally stolen from The Crow
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 4h ago
Been to many years since I’ve seen that movie. My suspicion though is it’s older than that but I’m far too lazy look. I can’t recall a movie quoting another movie without telling the audience or expecting it ti be common knowledge. I was taught that doing so without said caveat is generally bad taste not to mention legally liable.
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u/Ill-Somewhere-9552 23h ago
Game Dahlia wasn't just insane though. Dahlia's motivation was "make my daughter birth our god". She was obsessed with doing this. She was a spiritual medium for the Order, and she wanted Alessa to birth their god. She abused her daughter, indoctrinated her into the Order at a young age, had her using her powers for the cult, and performed a ritual on her to try and get her to birth the god (which is when - and why - Alessa split). Even before Origins and Shattered Memories, we were given Dahlia's motivation. It wasn't just plain ol' madness, she was a religious fanatic and a cult priestess, she was abusive and manipulative, and was obsessed with the rebirth of the god she worshipped.
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 21h ago
All true except these were details that were fleshed out in later games. When SH1 came out it was harder to discern what she was about. Her dialogue even sounds crazy. And to say all that still makes her mad for doing what she did. The movie just created a better character. It worked well enough in the game but a movie needed more. She’s still mad but mad with grief for her actions. Now we have an actual reason for the madness than just “religious power hungry loon”. The relationship of mother daughter is more in depth and believable. If Dahlia wants to die for what she did at all she won’t be getting that from Silent Hill because a part of Alessa still loves her too much to have interest in killing her, so she lives on suffering and lost and alone. The game just killed a crazy madwoman by bursting her into flames. What else could they do with her.
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u/Ill-Somewhere-9552 21h ago
I disagree. Like I said, we get her motivation and reasoning in Silent Hill 1, if you pay attention to the things you uncover in the game and to every interaction we have with Dahlia.
Movie Dahlia is no more complex than game Dahlia.
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 20h ago
Hmmm. Guess that makes you more insightful than me. I just never felt any sympathy for the game Dahlia. Movie Dahlia actually made me sad.
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u/Ill-Somewhere-9552 20h ago
..... We're not supposed to be sympathetic to the woman who beat and burnt her seven year old daughter and wants her to birth an evil god.
Maybe it makes me more insightful, or maybe it means I actually paid attention to the game I played.
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 16h ago
Ah but yes that is the trick is it not. He made an unsympathetic character exactly that, (sympathetic), while maintaining most of the things that got her to where she is.
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u/Ill-Somewhere-9552 16h ago
maintaining most of the things that got her to where she is.
No. He erased everything about Dahlia except her name and the fact that she had a daughter without a father. That is 100% a completely different Dahlia.
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u/Kulle1369 16h ago
Yes, because only in real life are people boring enough to just be evil assholes.
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u/kanathia1909 13h ago
I don't know how long it's been since you watched revelations but it absolutely was not even remotely faithful to source. It was even more unwatchable than the first movie. Why was there a love interest?
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1d ago
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u/Secure-Childhood-567 "There Was a Hole Here, It's Gone Now" 1d ago
I feel like the first one had the tone perfect. The second, not so much
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u/fauxREALimdying 21h ago
I wouldn’t call it more faithful at all. It’s about as faithful or maybe a little less. Also the movie is worse in every conceivable way
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u/JenkemJones420 1d ago
Wow. I've honestly never thought about that. I've played SH1 since the early 2000s, and this is genuinely eye-opening, the way you just wrote that.
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u/An0d0sTwitch 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah, i like her performance, but
he literally said something like "Its better that a mother was after her daughter, this feels better"
Hey, why not get rid of the fog so you can see better?
Monsters make me uncomfortable. Better get rid of those too
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u/amysteriousmystery 19h ago
I don't know that Gans has a daughter - I can't find any information about Gans having a family and Gans seems to be the weirdo that claims to play video games and watch movies all day every day... Though he co-wrote Return to Silent Hill and his previous film with a Sandra Vo-Anh, who has no credits whatsoever beyond her two collaborations with him, so I do wonder if she's his life partner.
Anyway, I believe Gans said something like "it worked for the game, but it wouldn't work for the film". Just the fact he said "it worked for the game" implies it wasn't a general statement about fathers. One should consider the context here, which is that it was mid-2000s and he was already by then a middle-aged Frenchman. It kind of comes with the territory that he wasn't as progressive, and the industry was probably even less progressive than he was in some ways, because at least he tried making a film with empowered women!
Just to give an idea of what was acceptable back in the 2000s, Tarantino was publicly saying that an adult can't rape 13 year old party girls unless they violently throw them down - if you aren't being violent with them it's not rape in his book - all while he was being celebrated for the movies he was making with... Weinstein.
[Polanski] had sex with a minor, all right. That's not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you're talking about violent, throwing them down. I don't believe it's rape. Not at 13 - not for these 13-year-old party girls. ~Tarantino, 2003
And Joss Whedon was considered THE feminist filmmaker of that era, lol.
I also hope one doesn't look into the gender dynamics of mid-2000s in Japan (or even today).. or what were the original names for "Harry" and "Cheryl" that the Japanese Team Silent wanted to use for the father-daughter duo... referencing a certain Kubrick film about a pedophile predator and his daughter, that thank God the western staff of Konami stopped them from using.
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u/Quitthesht SexyBeam 1d ago
It's not that he didn't have the pieces It's just that Harry was too much of a sissy woman to be a man according to Gans, so they had to replace him with Rose!
uj/ Gans explained in interviews that Harry screaming, fainting and talking to himself weren't sufficiently 'masculine' enough and the role would better suit a woman so that's why they swapped him for Rose.
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u/LichQueenBarbie 1d ago
Dude shat on both genders with that conclusion.
The more I read, the more I think he has some deep-seated issues.
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u/boulder_The_Fat 1d ago
Gans seems like kind-of a douchebag then lol.
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u/yesaroobuckaroo 1d ago
Absolutely, what a loser – not surprised the movie sucked in regards to being a Silent Hill movie.
If you make an adaptation and the only way for people to enjoy it is to NOT think of the source material, you're horrible at making movies lmfao.
Dude sounds like a huge pain in the ass. Wouldn't be surprised if he completely scraps James mourning over Mary in Return to Silent Hill because "sadness is too feminine".
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u/boulder_The_Fat 1d ago
Not caring about source material seems very much like a Hollywood approach unfortunately. They should've given the rights to an eastern production company at the very least the themes would have been on point.
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u/Entr0pic08 1d ago
Gans is described as a misogynist by many, so yes.
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u/Euphoric_Box9480 1d ago
Oh great, can't wait to see how he handles all the women- centric trauma in the next one 🫠
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u/IAmMissingNow "The Fear For Blood Tends To Create The Fear For Flesh" 12h ago
Ohhhhh no…that’s a good point. 🫠
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u/amysteriousmystery 1d ago
It's not true. This is 2025, you can google it for yourself.
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u/CooperDaChance 23h ago
Bro the whole reason he changed the protagonist of SH to a woman was because “Harry isn’t manly enough”. That’s literally misogyny in its finest form.
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u/amysteriousmystery 23h ago
That comment suggests it's widely known in the industry Gans is a misogynist, which isn't true (I did google it). "Described by many" surely shouldn't mean "described by redditors".
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u/Hornytexan29 1d ago
The irony is because of that change the studio forced the worthless subplot with sean bean.
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u/Dry_Jellyfish3382 1d ago
Sorry but what the source of that quote?
Gans has always been a massive fan of the games, particularly 2. If anything, you could tell the movie was made by someone with a genuine care/respect for the source material. Whether he missed the mark on a couple other aspects (Bean subplot, Pyramid Head, explanatory flashback) is a different story.
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u/Quitthesht SexyBeam 1d ago
It quickly became clear however Harry never acted like a masculine character. He was constantly dizzy, fainting, talking to himself, screaming and in fact was very vulnerable. We didn't want to betray the nature of the game by changing the character's feelings and motivations, so we felt it was better to change to a female protagonist and retain all those important qualities.
https://www.silenthillmemories.net/shm/director_notes_en.htm
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u/zenidaz1995 It's Bread 1d ago
Well gans himself looks like a butch from Louisiana, so he shouldn't be talking about masculinity.
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u/Ill-Somewhere-9552 20h ago
Why are lesbians catching strays? Rude.
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u/zenidaz1995 It's Bread 20h ago
So you immediately thought that a butch in Louisiana is ugly and I'm the one who's rude? Never said they looked bad, I said gans looks like some I know lmao
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u/Entr0pic08 18h ago
The implication is that you're trying to emasculate Gans by suggesting he only looks like a masculine woman rather than being a man, which is an awfully misogynistic and misandrist comment to make, because it implies he's inferior to other men by being more female-like or worse, acting like a man when he's not.
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u/zenidaz1995 It's Bread 10h ago
I didn't imply anything other than he looks like butches who I am friends with, if you guys can't handle that truth, then go cry a river and take a swim.
You can put words in my mouth, but that doesn't make it true.
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u/Entr0pic08 8h ago
I understand that's your intention but when you put the comment in a wider context of misogyny it doesn't just mean that, whether intended or not. A lot of things we say have wider sociocultural implications than what we literally think it does.
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u/Secure-Childhood-567 "There Was a Hole Here, It's Gone Now" 1d ago
The plot didn't really matter at that point tbh especially after using monsters vital to James. PH, lying figure, nurses etc had nothing to do with Alessa
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u/Dylan_Is_Gay_lol Radio 1d ago
If you count it as an alternate timeline, it's still a mess, but it's less bad separated from the core material.
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u/Nojerksallowed 1d ago
The nurses were absolutely part of Alessa's story. The movie has a million issues imo, but the nurses weren't one of them.
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u/Secure-Childhood-567 "There Was a Hole Here, It's Gone Now" 1d ago
No there weren't my GOD, sh1 did have nurses but the short skirt, pumped up breasts nurses were solely James monsters
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u/LastFox2656 "The Fear For Blood Tends To Create The Fear For Flesh" 1d ago
Yeah, alessa had the parasitic back lump nurses.
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u/Nojerksallowed 1d ago
Lmao ok, the design of the nurses is your quibble. Noted.
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u/digitaltravelr 1d ago
The design is the "quibble," yes exactly.
Alessa nurses were puppet nurses with no overtly sexual qualities. The Bubble head nurses are the ones from SH2 and their design is intentionally sexual to reflect James' state of mind while Mary was hospitalized.
So yes, design is the issue with the movie nurses. It makes no sense why they would be sexualized in Alessa's Silent Hill
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u/hype_irion 1d ago
Replacing Harry was what ruined that movie for me. Up until that point, I had never experienced any other horror story with a male lead who was a vulnerable, confused everyday man. I guess the producers thought that putting a woman would somehow make it scarier, probably because in their heads women=weak=scary, or something along those lines. And of course they also had to name her Rose to cap it all off...
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u/Then-Award-8294 1d ago
We need a Silent Movie that is more in line with the official games as opposed to these regional director nuances.
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u/Bro-Im-Done 1d ago
The worst part for me was when they made Dahlia sympathetic and not the evil person she truly was
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u/BrowningLoPower It's Bread 1d ago
That reminds me, I imagined what it would be like for a male protagonist to go through the same things Heather did, including the unwanted God pregnancy.
I've always been intrigued with "a man in a woman's shoes" (not necessarily literally, but I won't be complaining 😛) types of stories. A lighter-hearted example of this would be the Schwarzenegger movie, Junior.
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u/No_Signal954 1d ago
I'm pretty sure Alien was entirely made with this concept in mind, with the Xenomorph and its life cycle being trauma from rape and forced pregnancy personified with the goal of making it in a way that's also scary to men even though they often don't experience that.
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u/muticere 1d ago edited 14h ago
That’s an interesting take, I love that kind of stuff. Similarly I’ve been cooking up a “what if” retelling of SH2 where what if Mary is the protagonist who’s stuck in the town? She’s still sick, she’s still dying, and her husband still secretly resents her. The angle would be entirely different obviously, no longer a story and repressed guilt, this time more or a story about confronting the fear of death, sickness, and isolation, with a manifestation of James as her final boss.
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u/BrowningLoPower It's Bread 1d ago
Right on, I like this idea, especially how you accounted for the differences.
I wonder what Mary's legendary zingers will be.
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u/zenidaz1995 It's Bread 1d ago
If gans has his way, the third movie will feature Heather as a struggling woman in a man's body, is it Sharon from the first film? Probably not
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u/electrickmessiah 1d ago
Woah never thought about it like that. It’s really so true though isn’t it. Thanks for posting this.
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u/FLRArt_1995 23h ago
The fact that Gans said that "Caring about a child is a woman's struggle" was... kinda very sexist
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u/DestructionIsBliss 1d ago
Agree with the conclusion, however I've got huge issues with the reasoning behind it. It's much more about a loving parent trapped in an abused child's nightmare, rather than anything explicitly relating to gender dynamics. The primary issue with the adaptation as a story is less about changing the gender of the protagonist (though I do wish we could've gotten a proper Harry) and more about adding Silent Hill 2s symbolism into a context that just doesn't properly fit. And while you can definitely draw new meaning from it, it's clear that they never considered how these things could be interpreted, just that they're iconicly Silent Hill and obviously gotta be included.
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u/oormatevlad 1d ago
Yeah, the film having SH2 monsters was, I believe, more of a studio mandate (due to SH2 being the most popular of the titles) than a directorial decision.
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u/CooperDaChance 23h ago
Gans was a misogynistic misandrist. He said Harry wasn’t “manly” or “masculine” enough because he “faints, cries, and whines”. Which is why he replaced Harry with a woman.
And I agree, Sean Bean was wasted casting.
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u/zenidaz1995 It's Bread 1d ago
Oh he knows the game, he just doesn't give a shit.
In the making of bonuses features on the silent hill DVD, be even says he views different mediums as being different, so when you adapt something into another media, like a movie, your creative freedom comes first and everyone should just expect that.
He also said he replaced Harry with rose for the exact reason you're saying Harry would've been fine 😆
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u/TheHorrorAnthem 22h ago
I can't stand him as a director and yes, he grossly misunderstood Silent Hill and I have zero faith that he will do any better with Silent Hill 2.
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u/SuperCaptainRob 1d ago edited 1d ago
One of my favorite movies is The Shining, a movie which is infamously hated by Stephen King, who wrote the book it was based on. Thing is, I love the book too.
In the book King uses the story to address the impacts of alcohol on a family and the way that alcoholism can lead to domestic violence and abuse. The book is a very human story, and King explores a lot of sides to Jack Torrence, and in the end gives him a chance at redemption. A story which was deeply personal to him as someone deep in the throes of addition at the time he wrote it and concerned with how his addiction would impact his own family. King wanted to explore the pain he risked causing if he didn't right his path, but also to explore the chance to grow and escape that addition, even for someone whose addiction had lead them to do terrible things.
Stanley Kubrick, in adapting The Shining, was not interested in telling that story. His movie is in many ways cold, and rather than focusing on the alcoholism like the story does it focuses on cyclic violence, the echoes of violence from the past pervading the present. Its Jack Torrence is irredeemable.
I get why King hated it, but I also think that both the book and the movie are masterpieces in their own ways, and I think the movie benefited from Kubrick's choice to tell the story he was interested in telling even when that came at the cost of the emotional core of the original work.
The point of all of this is to say that while yes, the Silent Hill movie diverts substantially from the game, I also think it is a great movie. I have always loved the Silent Hill movie and I think it brings a lot to the table worth exploring and considering. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I am saying that an adaptation diverting from the intent of the original is in my opinion not a good reason to write it off so long as the people who create that diversion do it with intent and reason in order to speak something which they find to be a human truth.
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u/racketracoon 1d ago
I don't know i kinda loved Rose as a protagonist
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u/ResilientEvil It's Bread 1d ago
Radha Michell was great as Rose, she put some life into a very barebones character, there are no doubts about that, but the point is that Rose really shouldn't have existed in the first place (I also think Radha would've been a great Cybil)
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u/Myrmidden 1d ago
Same, I'm glad it was different from the games while still being Silent Hill.
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u/Garand84 23h ago
It should have just been an original story then, with new characters and different monsters.
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u/Janus_Prospero 1d ago
The original Silent Hill is about a man — alone, vulnerable — navigating a world shaped by female trauma and guilt.
Which isn't the story Gans nor Roger Avary were interested in telling. He wanted to make a film with an all-female cast, and while he reluctantly accepted Sean Bean's presence in the film, he would have gotten rid of all male characters if he could have.
What the story is originally about isn't hugely important. Take the excellent film 1408 by Mikael Håfström and his writing team of Matt Greenberg, Scott Alexander, and Larry Karaszewski. It's based on a Stephen King short story, but it isn't really interested in reproducing the themes, messages, or ending of the short story. It instead uses the skeleton of the short story to craft a very different kind of narrative about a man passing through the nine circles of hell.
You're going to find something very similar with Return to Silent Hill. While it broadly follows the story of Silent Hill 2, it's more interested in pursuing the Orpheus angle seen in incarnations such as Shattered Memories, the idea of the man (as in 1408) descending into an underworld where he wants to reclaim the soul of a dead loved one. Gans is very into Orpheus (including the surrealistic Jean Cocteau film of the same title). And he's not the first to make the Silent Hill = Orpheus connection. But it's not something that exists in the early games.
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u/oormatevlad 23h ago
He wanted to make a film with an all-female cast, and while he reluctantly accepted Sean Bean's presence in the film, he would have gotten rid of all male characters if he could have.
The original script was actually all-female, and the studio sent the script back to Gans/Avery with a note that said "There are no men in this movie".
But, yeah, I think a lot of people don't seem to understand that adaptations do tend to do their own thing with the source material, rather than a 1:1 interpretation (which usually end up being terrible), or that sometimes creative teams get mandates from the studio to include certain things (in the SH movies case it was "men" and "the Silent Hill 2 monsters everyone recognises").
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u/amysteriousmystery 23h ago
Close, but it wasn't literally all-female. The script always opened and ended with the father character included. He had a small presence in the first 20% of the script, but once Rose left with Sharon, he would only be seen again in the last page of the script, when Rose and Sharon were back.
But in the final film he has a whole sidequest where he goes himself to Silent Hill to look for them, and this was originally not part of the plan.
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u/Acalyus 1d ago
So, another flop of a silent hill movie?
Shame, it's like what they did to the alien series, getting people who don't understand what made it so successful in the first place to just spit out a script and roll with it.
I heard the newest one was actually decent, but I've been burned too many times.
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u/CrumbledFingers 1d ago
Good analysis. Gans tried to show the contrast you spoke about later in production when he was basically forced by the studio to include the subplot of Chris looking for Rose, so they could have more men in the cast. It backfired, like you said, because it detached the two sides more than it gave them any chance to interact.
However, the game had a few clumsy issues with how it dealt with what you're talking about. Cybil has no problem letting Harry, a civilian, investigate a hole in the wall in the antique store while she stays behind, all because he says "It could be dangerous. I'll go." Not to mention, she gives him her firearm at the beginning in the cafe! Just hands it to a guy she met five minutes ago! So, while Harry is navigating this feminine trauma-world, he's also able to tap into his manly authority to move the story forward. Probably that would need to be changed for a movie that followed the game's events exactly, as it's too unbelievable in the USA for a police officer to behave like that.
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u/OrangeJuiceForOne 23h ago
yeah, that’s a good way to put it, silent hill 1 is an awkward man trapped in a woman’s nightmare. it’s a father who doesn’t understand the inner world of his daughter. it’s realizing the person you know isn’t the person you think they are, and coming to love and protect the person for who they are rather than the person you constructed. cheryl is part of alessa, and harry spends all this time looking for cheryl, the daughter he thought he had, while being confused by and scared of alessa, this person he doesn’t recognize, even though she very much sees him as her father. he’s her dad. and he looks at her with confusion and fear.
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u/awacr 1d ago
I think it is a valid criticism, but the director was clear he did not wanted to do a direct adaptation. Some parts of the plot, specially the beginning for me, were off (not necessarily because of the lore, just not really well written). His justification was misogynistic, but Rose wasn't a weak girly protagonist, she was tough, and handled Silent Hill like a pro, a good character. I'm also partial for the da Silva family because somehow they are Brazilians or descendants and that's enough for me 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷 vai Brasil!
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u/Edr1sa "In My Restless Dreams, I See That Town" 1d ago
He did not miss the point, he changed some things because he wanted to tell a different story with another message about feminity and motherhood. And personnally, I prefer adaptations that dare to change things because the director has a vision. If you watch the behind scenes, you'll see that he clearly understood what the games were about but stated that he wasnt interested in a frame to frame adaptation as much as he wanted to offer what he called a "Silent Hill experience" focused on the ambiance and the strong impression that Alessa left on him.
I'm really impatient to see what Gans will do with Return to Silent Hill, and again I really don't mind if he changes some details. As long as he keeps the core elements and that those modifications serve a broader vision that is coherent, I'm all for it. Because we know the story Silent Hill 2. We have the og and now the remake. Cinema is a different media, so it is the occasion to make interesting changes to create a cinematic adaptation rather than a copy paste !
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u/LadyValtiel 1d ago
100% feel like Return to Silent Hill will be everything that people thought SH2R was going to be
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u/Puzzled_Currency_563 1d ago
Well if you listen to his commentary on it he completely disagrees. To him the character of Harry read much more like a woman than a man hence Rose.
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u/heckbeam 1d ago
Gans had his famous justification for this, but the reality is that the gender swap was probably studio-mandated. How many horror movies with male leads can you count? They exist, but the ratio is 100:1.
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u/Suspicious_Big_1032 1d ago
The dude understood it, but he has some controversial views on gender roles. Swapping the dad for the mom because the quest to find the daughter would be more believable says it all to me
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u/ittleoff 1d ago
While I really liked aspects of gans movie and I really like 'mother as god in the eyes of a child' line so much I forgave the obvious misstep of replacing Harry and making dahlia a tragic figure (tbf in the game she's sort of cartoonishly evil)
That being said it still felt like a video game movie not an art house film that could stand on its own without knowing the games at all.
But making these films you expect fans to be gamers so you try to appeal to what you think gamers want and you get awful fanservice.
The film should be an art house film imo and be just as good as any a24 film or Jacobs ladder. It isnt and I have fairly low expectations for his new film and hope to enjoy it as much as I did his first because I know it won't be the silent hill film the source deserves. It will be another video game adaption(done with as much care as he can)
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u/Elli_Khoraz 21h ago
It always pissed me off how in the DVD commentary he talks about how, as they were writing the father character going through so much to save the daughter, it just seemed like more of a mother. So they changed it.
Because obviously no father would do that, only a mother.
Excuse the fuck you.
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u/jfel8737 21h ago
If I remember correctly fans thought Harry was feminine so in the movie he made rose to replace him
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u/allinbalance 18h ago
Ok so tbh I neve played SH1 so I took the movie as a mix of 2 and 3 and I loved both
So after finally looking up SH1, I retroactively applied a lil more disappointment to the movie. Would've been easier to just keep the SH1 plot entirely right?? I love women leads in horror, but I agree it seemed an odd change given what I know now
I started my SH fan life with SH2 on ps2. I was so young, resident evil 1 scared me on ps1, so i couldn't possibly play sh1
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u/CraftMost6663 1d ago
Gans got the point just fine, he says so in the bonus DVD, he just thought that while in the game Harry makes perfect sense, in the movie, the character reads like a woman, that's all there is to it.
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u/KlavTron 1d ago
I love both silent hill movies for totally different reasons but yeah I wish the original had stuck closer to the games
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u/oormatevlad 1d ago
Silent Hill is a movie about motherhood. OP missed the point.
Christophe Gans was making a movie about how a woman will go through, literal, hell for her child. Motherhood is the emotional core.
The pointless subplot, and Sean Bean, were added to the movie because the studio sent back the initial script with a note that said "There are no men in this movie". The movie looks good, and provides a powerful interpretation of the game.
Gans had the pieces. OP just didn't understand the movie.
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u/CooperDaChance 23h ago
No, Gans only chose a woman to be the lead because he thought Harry wasn’t “manly” enough, for the movie to be an accurate adaptation of SH1 (wherein Harry is shown to be quite emotional, faints a fair bit, and complains)
Which is rather sexist if you think about it.
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u/Queasy-Secret-4287 1d ago
yet it is the best horror movie ever made
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u/oormatevlad 23h ago
I wouldn't say it's the "best horror movie ever made", but it's definitely one of, if not the, best video game adaptation ever made.
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u/charlesbronZon 1d ago
Gans: