news culture Silent Hill: A film reboot by Christophe Gans (Le Pacte des Loups) for 2023!
Silent Hill, one of the major video game sagas of horror, experienced the joys of a film adaptation in 2006 before becoming disillusioned with its sequel six years later. The director of the first film – Christophe Gans – seems to be taking up the torch after having entrusted it to MJ Bassett on Revelation 3D. A reboot of Silent Hill at the cinema would be in the cards.
A reboot of Silent Hill at the cinema
On the occasion of the 4K remastering of Le Pacte des Loups and its cinema release on June 10, 2022, the HelloSolar.info editorial staff spoke for 20 minutes with Christophe Gans, a French artist who you also know for Crying Freeman with Mark Dacascos. According to the director, a new Silent Hill movie will be released in 2023. Indeed, the script, which would have taken a year to write, would be finished. This is a reboot of the saga at the cinema. It is therefore in no way a continuation of the films of 2006 and 2012. On the contrary, this new Silent Hill independent and supervised by Konami is inspired by the new horrific movements which have recently haunted the 7th Art. We necessarily think of Mister Babadook (2014), Hereditary (2018) or Midsommar (2019).
I’m currently working on it. There were the Covid-19 years which finally forced us to stay at home. I took the opportunity to write two scripts. The script for a new Silent Hill movie that is totally independent from the two previous movies made and respects the way Silent Hill has evolved. Most of the time, these are stand-alone stories. Silent Hill is a bit like Twilight Zone, the Fourth Dimension, a place where anything and everything can happen. I worked on a new Silent Hill which is a Silent Hill of the year 2023 since the film would be released next year… in 2023… and not a Silent Hill as I imagined it in 2006. It is a Silent Hill for today’s audiences while being ultra respectful of the saga. I am aware that Silent Hill is a very great video game franchise and a work of art in the noble sense of the term. The people who thought up SIlent Hill put a lot of their guts into it. To know them well, they are extremely honest people. For me, it was important to design a Silent Hill in the light of the current public. It is clear that today’s horror cinema no longer resembles the horror cinema of 2006. Good for that matter. Not that 2007 horror cinema wasn’t good, but every genre is going through an evolution. I’m trying to take into account what I’ve been able to see recently, which is more original and more surprising in terms of horror films, and to see if in Silent Hill there are the seeds, or even the expression of that. Silent Hill has always been a game beyond the norm and ahead of its time. – Christophe Gans (Director)
A Project Zero movie in ambush
Christophe Gans is a huge fan of video games, and more particularly of Japanese horror productions from the PlayStation 2 era. Beyond Silent Hill and a second episode that he still considers in 2022 to be one of the best games of all time, the French director has set his sights on the Fatal Frame franchise published by Tecmo and launched in 2001. Indeed, the latter is working in collaboration with Koei Tecmo on a project to adapt Project Zero (the European name) intended for cinemas. The script, which also took a year of work, is finished. Project Zero the film would be released after the Silent Hill reboot, probably in 2024, or even later.
What interests me is to reach a point of balance between video games and cinema. I’m not saying that I succeeded completely with the first part of Silent Hill, but the film was rather well received by the fans. However, these are relatively demanding. I think they understood that the film had been made by a gamer, but above all that I was trying to find the point of convergence between cinematographic and video game languages. That’s how I worked on the script for the new Silent Hill, but also for Fatal Frame, Project Zero for us Europeans. That would be the next movie. By the way, the script is ready. Over the two years of Covid, there was a year of writing for Silent Hill and another for Fatal Frame. In both cases, I wrote under the supervision of the Konami and Tecmo teams. – Christophe Gans (Director)
