It's All in Your Head Mr Tweedy

There is a scene in Chicken Run where Mr. Tweedy is watching main hen Ginger as she plans to escape. Mrs. Tweedy doesn’t believe him and shuts down his concerns with the words “It’s all in your head Mr. Tweedy, say it.”

Long story short, when the writer uses the purely psychological for their horror or story, you are often bound by the unreliable realities of the perspective.

This can make for some great stories, who doesn’t love the likes of The Tell-Tale Heart or Gone Girl when exploring unreliable narratives?

These are not the ones that I am interested in talking about. I am more interested in talking about the use of the hallucinating or unreliable narrators. Which results in a mitigation of engagement in audiences through the reveal of an absence of things to care about.

I plan to use The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope and Silent Hill F in this blog post because I feel they are guilty of the problem that I just brought up. Both ruin their stories by using the purely psychological rather than marrying the mind and supernatural as one.

I think it misunderstands what makes the likes of Silent Hill so special as a horror series. Where the psychological becomes physical and the hell you see is one designed for you especially.

There are going to be spoilers for both Little Hope and Silent Hill F, as well as for Silent Hill 1 and Shattered Memories. So, if you don’t want to be spoiled, then please feel free to pause on this article and .... I dunno, read my stuff instead?

Excellent, then let us begin.

Little Hope for a satisfying ending

Little Hope is heavily inspired by Silent Hill, right down to the horror stylings, the monster designs and the signpost that showcases the haunted town’s name. Mind you, this was during the Silent Hill dry spell which we had to suffer through, so competition was attempted by Supermassive.

It’s pretty spooky, not as harrowing as Silent Hill was during its peak, but it was a pretty enjoyable mixture of an endless cycle of suffering and the past’s sins haunting the present.

Well, that is until you get the good ending, where you, the player, discover that 90% of the characters involved in the story are not real and the protagonist is just some crazy person dithering about the town imagining everything.

Yeah, he was guilty, and his family died but the history haunting the present and the curse of suffering the same death forever was just completely made up. The link between the Salem Witch trials didn’t matter, the people you were keeping alive didn’t matter, nothing mattered.

I think when the hacks at Supermassive set themselves to emulate what made Silent Hill good, they misunderstood the importance of having stakes and meaningful consequences. They thought, that by making it all psychological, it would make the story more mature. Who needs such silly things like ghosts or metaphors or personification. The mature story foregoes such useless things and makes it all about the human.

Well, there is truth to that, you can really delve into the depths of the protagonist's neurosis by using the horror to explore their mental issues. But there need to be consequences, there need to be outcomes for the horror and the actions made under such conditions. That is where Little Hope fails and say The Tell-Tale Heart succeeds, one removes all consequences while Poe shows the horror of the man’s madness through his narration.

One is exploring the depths of one man’s insanity; the other is that but without the murder.

You can guess which one doesn’t feel like an absolute waste of time.

I also feel that one shouldn’t be afraid of using monsters, hell that one should view the inclusion of literal monsters as a useful means of expressing the horror of the protagonist. Silent Hill thrived on the environment shaping itself into a very personalised hell for its inhabitants. Sometimes these are shaped by the protagonist themselves, such as with James Sunderland, or shaped by the secondary characters like Alessa Gillespie or Walter Sullivan.

So, when Little Hope tries to ape Silent Hill with its brand of surreal horror, it makes everything in the head of the protagonist. This showcases a foundational misunderstanding of what makes Silent Hill special, what makes many a scary story worth reading. The consequences and the threat of danger are real and tangible.

Otherwise, the audience feels cheated, feels like they have gotten invested in hot air.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories might have been considered guilty, after all the game was inside Cyril’s head to cope with the death of her dad. But I would disagree with it as the horror of repression is explored within the game (Raw Shocks) and there is catharsis with Cyril being able to heal from the trauma of losing her dad. There are consequences for it, regardless of if it isn’t wholly real. If you want something psychological then let there be consequences!

So that brings me to Silent Hill F.

I had a lot of optimism for Silent Hill F. Konami seemed to be trying hard to make something new, marrying Japanese folklore and culture with the surrealist horror that made the IP special.

I could go into how the game fails to take advantage of the themes it wants to explore within the narrative. I could talk about the lack of a connective tissue to the town that all the games pre Short Message had. But I want to talk about the ending here so that is what I shall do.

During your first playthrough, after going through some very intense horror set pieces. You are forced to get the ending in which nothing was real, all of it was just a hallucination by the protagonist, after killing everyone at a wedding.

The fact that this isn't just one of the endings, like the dying dream ending for Harry in SH1, or the UFO ending suggests that this is the intended ending for Silent Hill F. Your only reward for all that well-crafted horror is to be told that none of it was important.

You can imagine why I think that this is a disgraceful ending for the player, especially for a Silent Hill game.

Silent Hill marries the supernatural with the psychological. Your mind makes the monsters that pose the threat to you, the player. That was the case until F, where you could be assured that in canon, the monsters and threat were real.

And I can understand the appeal to mess with the formula, that is after all part of Konami’s plan for the Silent Hill brand. But I hope that this part of the experiment is tossed aside in the bin.

This is because having the threat be all in the head with zero consequences for people we care about, then you have wasted the player’s time. You have something slightly more intelligent than the “it was all just a dream.”

So, why is that a problem? Outside the importance of having stakes?

Because we need the story to matter, without stakes or something that makes everything the protagonist has suffered, matter. Both Silent Hill F and Little Hope discard this important element of storytelling, in their misguided attempt to make their story profound, mature or subverting expectations, they instead rob the audience of a satisfying payoff.

That is why I say this twist is a slightly better version of the dream twist. The entire story is pointless; the audience is punished for investing their limited time and energy into a story where all the themes and growth do not matter.

If you must make an in the head ending, at least, have there be consequences. I know some will argue that F’s ending shows the consequences, after all there was a marriage massacre. But we don’t know any of the people at the wedding, and Shimizu Hinako doesn’t change. She starts out not wanting to get married and ends it making damn sure she doesn’t do that. She is a bad person for letting her friends die in the fog (no lasting consequences by the way) and ends with her killing people. Either way she is not a good person ever.

One of the few all in the head stories that do work would be Bridge to Terabithia, where the imagination of the kids allows them to grow and mature. The real world is there, but the fantasy world dreamt up in their heads helps them cope and understand reality. It wasn’t a twist ending, the blurred line between fact and fiction provided an enriching experience for the audience rather than taking away from it.

Silent Hill as a series understood this pre F, there is a reason why the dying dream ending isn’t canon to the series. Team Silent understood the importance of stakes to the narrative, something which Ryukishi07 seems to be less interested in. I have no doubt that Ryukishi07 wanted to make something good, and that’s its own kettle of fish.

Ryukishi07 apparently has a thing with making all the horror in the heads of his protagonists, I haven’t read When They Cry because it seemed pointlessly cruel and mean to children, something which I dislike having as a horror writer myself. But this habit of the purely psychological makes him an ill fit for Silent Hill’s story, due to his inability to understand what makes Silent Hill special in horror media.

Silent Hill F is part of Konami's attempt to update the series for a new generation, so I cannot expect them to keep to the town all the time. I just hope that they don’t take the wrong lessons from F and make all games in the series to be in the head. That I think would make the series very disappointing and would make me skip those entries.

So, I urge you folks to write with consequence, please do not write dream or head twist endings with your horror. Or if you must, just make sure there are consequences for it, show it, foreshadow it, don’t try to be clever in that way because you will most likely fail if you are not careful.

Go well and write some good horror.