Silent Hill is coming back to the movies. Details on the upcoming new Silent Hill movie sequel have been sparse since it was announced in 2022, but during Thursday’s Silent Hill Transmission livestream, a short behind-the-scenes video revealed some new details, and gave us our best look yet at director Christophe Gans’ take on adapting the story of Silent Hill 2. The livestream also featured an extended gameplay sequence from the upcoming video game remake of Silent Hill 2.
The movie, called Return to Silent Hill, will closely mirror the story of the second Silent Hill game according to Gans. That means it will follow James Sunderland, played in the movie by War Horse’s Jeremy Irvine, as he ventures to the town of Silent Hill in search of his lost love, Mary. But when he gets there, he finds it transformed into something dark and terrible. Or as Gans puts it, “It’s become something like hell.”
The livestream video is mostly on-set footage narrated by Gans, but even without the benefits of post-production, Return to Silent Hill is already looking pretty great. Part of that is thanks to Gans’ insistence, once again, that every monster possible is by played by a human — more specifically, a dancer. Gans explains that this was his approach on the original movie from 2006 as well, and that he finds that these performers give the monsters an otherworldly, inhuman style of movement that’s both beautiful and unsettling. And based on the footage of the dancers in Thursday’s video, even without the monster make up, he’s definitely right.
In the past, Gans has also explained that Return to Silent Hill will not be a direct sequel to his original movie, Silent Hill, or its sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation, which was directed by M.J. Bassett. Instead, Gans says to think of these movies more like an anthology series, where each entry can tell its own unique story in the Silent Hill universe without worrying too much about the previous movies. In fact, Gans has explained that he drew quite a bit of inspiration for the film from concept art for P.T. as well as Silent Hill 2.
There’s no word yet on when Return to Silent Hill will hit movie theaters. The video game remake of Silent Hill 2 will be released on Oct. 8.
