Literature
Team Silent Hill seems to be a pretty well-read group of game designers!
Here is the street name listing I submitted to Gunsmith for his excellent FAQ
(available at Gamefaqs.com):
Most of the street names are all names of
famous authors.
a. Finney- Jack Finney, author of Time and Again
b. Bachman- Stephen King's pseudonym, who wrote The Regulators
c. Bloch- Robert Bloch, author of Psycho
d. Matheson- Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend
e. Ellroy- Jack Ellroy, author of The Black Dahlia
f. Bradbury- Ray Bradbury, author of Something Wicked This Way Comes
g. Levin- Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby
h. Sanford- John Sanford, author of the "Prey" books
i. Simmons- Dan Simmons, author of Song of Kali
j. Sagan- Carl Sagan, author of Contact
k. Crichton- Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park
l. Koontz- Dean Koontz, author of Phantoms
m. Midwich- name of the town in The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (basis
for films Village of the Damned)
n. Wilson- F. Paul Wilson, author of Nightworld
Some further explanations:
b. In Richard Bachman's The Regulators,
a young boy has the ability to create things with his mind; this is reminiscent
of Alessa's powers, depending on what theory you happen to subscribe to as to
what exactly is going on in Silent Hill.
d. Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is about the last human left alive on earth in a world full of vampires. That protagonist's fate is somewhat mirrored in the isolation experienced by Harry Mason.
e. Well, the book's called The Black Dahlia, and Dahlia Gillespie is the name of a major character... made sense to me.
f. Something Wicked This Way Comes is about a small down endangered by a supernatural evil masquerading behind a travelling carnival; the amusement park scene in Silent Hill immediately sprung to my mind.
g. In Rosemary's Baby, a cult has a young woman impregnated with the child of Satan-- very reminiscent of Dahlia's plan to make her child a "god" that seems more interested in destruction of mankind than salvation.
l. Phantoms is about a town that seems completely abandoned, when in actuality its residents have been killed and absorbed by an ancient evil being. In Silent Hill, everyone has disappeared-- where they have gone is up for debate, but Harry's predicament somewhat mirrors that of the characters in Phantoms.
m. If you haven't seen the 1960 film version of Village of the Damned, you should do so immediately. A classic story that is very familiar even if you haven't seen the film or read Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, it concerns a group of evil children with unnatural powers born after everyone in the town of Midwich mysteriously loses consciousness one day. In a nice stroke of black humour, the game designers made sure that one of the game's locations is Midwich Elementary.
n. A reader reviewer over on Amazon.com summed up the plot of F. Paul Wilson's Nightworld very nicely: "As the days become progressively shorter because of a late-rising and early-setting sun, cries of armageddon resound around the globe. Then a 200-ft hole opens up in Central Park, each night out of which pour swarms of alien insects who devour anything and everything they can. As scientists futilely try to understand these phenomena and the world is plunged further into inescapable madness, one wizened old man must struggle to gather a group of unlikely heroes together for the final stand against the force behind the chaos...." Silent Hill concerns a strange world where its protagonist experiences sudden shifts between one world and one much darker; the town is beset with strange beasts ready to kill Harry at every opportunity, and it goes without saying that Silent Hill has been plunged into inescapable madness that no one understands.
Some time after I sent this to Gunsmith, some other fellows over at The Gaming Intelligence Agency did me one better:
Many people who've passed through the town of Silent Hill have realized that there's a significance to the street names - they're all named after well-known sf/fantasy/horror writers. But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the pattern goes deeper than that. In fact, all the authors mentioned have written novels that revolve around common, everyday towns in danger. To wit:
John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos
Ray Bradbury: Something Wicked This Way Comes
Robert Charles Wilson: Mysterium
Dean Koontz: Phantoms, Midnight
Carl Sagan: The Demon-Haunted World
James Ellroy: The Black Dahlia
Dan Simmons: Summer of Night
Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King): The Regulators, Salem's Lot
Ira Levin: The Stepford Wives
Robert Matheson: I Am Legend
Robert Bloch: American Gothic (?)
Jack Finney: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Michael Crichton: Andromeda Strain
Further explanation follows:
Robert Charles Wilson's Mysterium, according to a Booklist review
at Amazon.com, concerns a town that is transported to "an
unfamiliar, forested landscape" after "an
anomalous UFO fragment is bombarded with radiation at a secluded government
facility...." This reference seems just as likely
as F. Paul Wilson's Nightworld: mysterious goings-on that envelops a
whole town, and maybe this explains the UFO Ending. That's a joke, son.
A very brief synopsis of Dean Koontz's Midnight, from Amazon.com reviewer bobbyelephant: "The novel is set in a small town in Northern California, where an experiment has been transforming humans into "something else." An FBI agent and a ragtag group of survivors bands together to respond to the horror."
Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World isn't so much a standard fiction novel as it is a journal of Sagan's thoughts on various strange fringes on the edge of science (the book's subtitle is Science As a Candle in the Dark). However, he does discuss some interesting topics relevant to the story of Silent Hill, including a couple of things pertaining to the UFO ending-- UFO abduction and channeling ("Channeling Stone?"). Sagan also discusses witchcraft, ESP, and myth-- all topics not out of place in the story of Silent Hill in pretty much anyone's theory.
I felt pretty dumb for forgetting about Summer of Night. Once again, from Amazon.com: "In Elm Haven, Illinois, someone--or something--is stalking the children. An ancient, sinister evil lurks in the dark, and when a long-silent bell peals in the middle of the deepest night, the people know it marks the beginning of terror." The Midwich school bell? The evil children? The ancient, sinister evil? Oh well. Song of Kali just made a much deeper impression on me, even though I have read Summer of Night. Oops.
Stephen King's Salem's Lot is about a town that is slowly taken over by vampires. Again, a town where the people start disappearing.
The Stepford Wives is a strange tale in which the husbands of a small town have all their wives replaced with robots. Not too much relevance to Silent Hill, but it takes place in a small town.
Robert Bloch's American Gothic is about a serial killer, as is Psycho. I have yet to encounter a work by Bloch with primarily supernatural overtones; it's likely the game's designers were mainly influenced by Hitchcock's film version of Psycho moreso than Bloch's literary work. This is further evidenced by the appearance of Norman's Hotel (as in Norman Bates, the main character in Psycho).
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another classic like The Midwich Cuckoos. Many people know the story, even if they don't know exactly where it came from: a small town is beset with evil aliens who take the form of your friends, neighbors, and family. Again, not directly related to Silent Hill, but a terrifically influential work.
Finally, The Andromeda Strain is another science fiction tale about very bad things happening to a small town. From the review on Amazon.com: "A Nobel-Prize-winning bacteriologist, Jeremy Stone, urges the president to approve an extraterrestrial decontamination facility to sterilize returning astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft that might carry an "unknown biologic agent." The government agrees, almost too quickly, to build the top-secret Wildfire Lab in the desert of Nevada. Shortly thereafter, unbeknownst to Stone, the U.S. Army initiates the "Scoop" satellite program, an attempt to actively collect space pathogens for use in biological warfare. When Scoop VII crashes a couple years later in the isolated Arizona town of Piedmont, the Army ends up getting more than it asked for." As you may guess, the people of Piedmont are infected by a strain of alien bacteria, and bad things happen.
Film
When Silent Hill was released, there were several interviews with the
game's creators. In most of these interviews, the same names kept popping up:
David Lynch and David Cronenberg were the two most popular. The idea of a small
town beset by unknown horrors is one that would be right at home in the world
of David Lynch: indeed, his Twin Peaks concerned a town that seemed so
bizarre that some organized evil force just had to be behind the weird
goings-on. Here are some parallels I have noticed between Silent Hill and the
works of these two influential directors:
David Lynch
As mentioned above, Twin Peaks is about a small
town that seems to be home to an unusually high quotient of insanity. When Special
Agent Dale Cooper is assigned to investigate the murder of a young girl, he
encounters both eccentric townspeople and more ominous supernatural phenomena.
Harry Mason's encounters with the otherworldly are a bit more obvious from the
start, but the ideas are somewhat similar.
Lynch's Eraserhead, while not immediately resembling anything in Silent Hill, is another widely influential film. In it, Lynch created a dark, industrial city with decidedly claustrophobic attributes (small living spaces, close quarters) and a set of circumstances in which the characters (and the viewers) are often unsure of what is really happening and what might be a dream. This idea figures heavily in the story of Silent Hill. In addition, the film's extremely unusual soundtrack (which makes use of many odd sounds) is not a far cry from that of Silent Hill's.
Another film by Lynch with a similarly disorienting structure and dark, claustrophobic atmosphere is Lost Highway, which was also probably highly influential in the design of Silent Hill.
David Cronenberg
David Cronenberg's films are probably the biggest influence
on the design of Silent Hill, definitely as far as influential film works.
Consistently unsettling, Cronenberg pioneered the kind of disturbing physical
horrors that his name is now most often associated with. In The Brood,
an insane woman and a crazed psychologist issue an army of demonic mutant children.
In Shivers, a scientist manages to drive his entire apartment building
insane with his experiments, with horribly disgusting results. In his most recent
full-length film, eXistenZ, the viewer is intentionally disoriented as
to the nature of reality.
While none of Cronenberg's films other than The Brood (with its monster children) have any direct relation to the story or happenings of Silent Hill, his films have been highly influential in the horror genre.
Certainly, other filmmakers contributed in their own way to the creation of Silent Hill. If I can find any of those old interviews, I'll be sure to include more information here.