Despite the series not having been active for half a decade, and its best days having been over for well over ten years, Silent Hill is still the only horror series gamers think of. Resident Evil morphed into an action franchise, which leaves Silent Hill as our go-to source for gaming horror.
While the series seems to be dead and buried now, there were at least enough horror moments available for us to remember them fondly by. If you happen to have access to consoles that play the Silent Hill games, then you need to look out for these 10 scariest moments that can be found in the series.
10 10. UFO Endings (Every Game)
These endings were kept in exclusively as gags for the player, but they make it in our scariest list because getting a UFO ending meant everything you went through was for nothing. You got no payoff, no reward for so many hours of effort; all you got was a lame joke that didn’t elicit any laughter.
Plus, the first time one gets a UFO ending, they have no clue there’s such a thing that exists in a Silent Hill game, which takes you completely by surprise. In this way, these endings are scarier than any other in the series, since they represent your ultimate failure.
9 9. Chase Sequence (Silent Hill: Shattered Memories)
The eerie part about these zombies/ghosts are that their appearance is totally up to your choice and you never realized it. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, the game is frequently met with breaks where you talk to a psychologist, who gives you a list of options based on your personality.
The zombies that manifest within the game are the ones taking form taking into account the answers you gave out. This means whenever you see a gluttoned zombie, or a skeletal one, it’s representing your personality directly to you. This makes these chase sequences a more harrowing experience, as you’re essentially being chased around in the ice by darker manifestations of your own psyche.
8 8. Eddie’s Introduction (Silent Hill 2)
There’s no direct horror in this scene, but Silent Hill 2 masterfully gives us a disgusting sight to keep us scared in its world. Before you encounter Eddie, you come across a horrifying sight of a bloody corpse around a table. Making the scene ominous are the continuous sounds of belching around the vicinity.
Once you get to the source, you find this guy vomiting profusely in a toilet bowl, insisting he didn’t kill the man whose corpse was laid out in the hall. The uncertainty of the whole situation, combined with the bloody sight before you only makes the presence of Eddie more unsettling. The scene seems to be building up to an attack from Eddie; however, the fact that he continues to vomit without further explanation is somehow eerier.
7 7. Let Me Burn (Silent Hill Origins)
The protagonist in Silent Hill Origins came across as an overtly chill dude, who didn’t get overwhelmed by the clearly startling events he was in the middle of. In the beginning of the game, he came across a burning house; venturing in, the protagonist found a little girl right in the middle of flames.
Had the main character reacted with fright, it would’ve gone with the normal horror trope, but since he remained deadly calm, the little girl’s whisper of “Let me burn” made the player jump in shock. The girl was burnt almost to a crisp; yet, her voice sounded so calm it was if she had just woken up from a deep sleep.
6 6. Lisa Garland’s Truth (Silent Hill)
There was clearly something off about Lisa from the moment we met her. Of course, everything about Silent Hill was off, but Lisa was mysteriously all right in appearance when everything else around her was bloody and decrepit. She was also suffering from some kind of amnesia, whose truth came back to haunt us.
Lisa would admit to Harry that she did remember who she was – she was one of the other dead nurses. Just when she remembered this, Lisa would begin bleeding buckets from within her scalp, and her appearance would completely transform as she horrendously became one of the zombie-like nurses that were out to eat our brains.
5 5. The Bloody Locker (Silent Hill)
Although Silent Hill does throw in-your-face scares at us regularly, its genius truly lies in creating eerie atmospheres for the player; something that answers nothing and only makes us question further. This happened in this scene too, as Harry entered a locker room area where there was an incessant banging coming from one of the lockers.
Once opened, out jumped a cat that was for some reason placed in there. You’d have laughed off this jump scare the first time; the next time you were in that location, though, it didn’t go the same way. Once again, the locker banged hard, but when opened – there was nothing in it. After you closed it back, thick blood oozed out of the sides of the locker door.
4 4. Eileen Head (Silent Hill 4: The Room)
Sometimes, the scares that arrive at random with no explanations to their point whatsoever are the worst ones you can come across. In Silent Hill 4: The Room, the deuteragonist of the story, Eileen, isn’t even in this moment, yet she is the one haunting us.
During one sequence in the game, the player has to move forward in a hallway. To the sides are multiple doors, which don’t need to be entered, although going in is your choice. Inside one of them, you’ll find the revolting sight of an enlarged Eileen head! She does nothing, she says nothing; the only movement she makes is the constant whirring of her eyes, which follow us around without fail in that congested room containing her enormous head.
3 3. Mirror Room (Silent Hill 3)
The first time you enter this room, it seems like every other derelict area in the game. However, once you go and stand in front of the mirror, you’ll notice how the surroundings start to rot and deteriorate. Just move around a bit more, and you’ll see the protagonist in the mirror starting to take on a bloodier appearance.
Before you know it, the entire room begins squirming into a traumatic sight, as the reflection in the mirror stops obeying the laws of nature and stands still while the protagonist moves around. In a time when the graphical potential was very low in consoles, this horror scene was astounding.
2 2. Every Pyramid Head Scene (Silent Hill 2)
Describing what Pyramid Head was doing when we first saw him is too vulgar to write here, but we will say that it was meant to show him having his way with the female corpses – a representation of the urges of the protagonist.
Pyramid Head is the most iconic villain from the Silent Hill series, and every scene he’s involved in Silent Hill 2 has us reeling with fright. It’s the fact that his head is encased in a literal pyramid-like mask (and that he wreaks bloody havoc everywhere) that makes him so horrifying. When Pyramid Head shows up, you know it’s time to run for your life.
1 1. The Woman In The Hall (P.T. - Silent Hills)
It’s become a cliche to list P.T. as the top achievement in the Silent Hill series, but we’ll have to follow the tradition because the game was just so mindblowing. Every scene in the continuous loop of this demo was truly spine-curdling.
If we’re going to narrow it just to one moment, we’ll choose the first sight of the Woman in the hall. That’s because you see her standing there within a second after looking away. She just stands there, seeming as if she’s prepared to drink every blood running through your veins. The first-person view makes you think you really are in that hallway, looking across the being that will kill you and possibly consume your soul.
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