Roger Avary, the man who penned the script for Christophe Gans’ 2006 horror Silent Hill, has confirmed he will return to write a second installment.
Sony Pictures have announced shooting will begin next year, although it seems unlikely that Gans himself, who was largely responsible for the stunning visuals of the first film, will return to direct. If Gans does not return, it will be a big miss, given that most of the positive criticism levelled at Silent Hill centred around the visuals, which survived largely intact in their transition from the video games to the big screen.
Although I will stand in defence of Silent Hill up to a point (it remains one of the best video game adaptations, although that in itself is slightly hollow praise) Avary’s script for the original was hardly watertight, and left a lot of people bemused. The difficult in translating something like survival horror is cleary the fact that, in the game, the player spends a vast amount of time alone. In the context of a game, this is fine; after all, the experiences are directly had by the player. For a film, stories and characters need to be refined/added to form a narrative better suited to a cinematic experience.
For this to be better than the original, they need a killer story, they need the compositions of Akira Yamaoka (the man behind the eerie game soundtracks) to return and they need to do Pyramid Head the service he didn’t receive in the original, presuming he is in it. They also need to please a legion of fanboys.
Should be easy.