Trigger Happy
characters are incompetently written and amazingly badly acted. Some films have a “so bad it’s good” quality, but this hack attempt at drama is just so bad it’s appalling. If it’s supposed to be like a film in this way, it’s a film you wouldn’t ever want to see.
However, what Silent Hill does successfully breed from its cinematic forebears is quite simple: a powerful sense of atmosphere. Tense wandering in dark environments is interrupted by shocks, sudden appearances of blood-curdling monsters. Silence is interrupted by grating noise, making you jump and increasing your nervousness. The same sort of atmospheric virtue is present in the Resident Evil series of zombie videogames, which themselves are the subject of interesting cross-media developments. It was long rumored that George Romero was to make a live- action film based on Resident Evil, which would have been apt, not only because he directed a highbudget television commercial for the second game in the franchise, but because the Resident Evil games themselves cheerfully lift wholesale the camera angles and action sequences from Romero’s own classic zombie flicks such as Dawn of the Dead.
Why is it particularly the horror genre, and to a lesser extent science fiction, that largely provides the
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