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Franchise / Silent Hill

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Enjoy your stay. Or die trying.

"The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh."

Silent Hill is a video game franchise created and produced by Konami. Alongside Capcom's Resident Evil, it is considered one of the defining examples of the Survival Horror genre in the medium, with the games being critically acclaimed for their story, atmosphere, sound design and soundtrack.

The series surrounds the various happenings that occur in the eponymous American lakeside resort town; even before the location became known to a slew of disappearances, murders, and mysterious activity (mostly owing to the existence of at least one demon-worshipping cult), Native Americans called the area in which the town stands a cursed "land of the spirits".

Perhaps thanks to both that cult's actions and the already haunted nature of the land, Silent Hill is host to multiple "layers". Usually, it's your average Americana tourist attraction. But to select individuals, it becomes a long-abandoned, desolate town that's empty of any life save for the lost and damned who stumble onto its streets. And beyond even that lies the crumbling ruin that is the Otherworld: a burning, rusty place that may as well be Hell itself.

In stark comparison to most games in the survival horror genre, the game focuses succinctly on psychological horror. Every protagonist has an internal struggle that the town itself takes hold of, altering its very environment and the creatures they'll encounter based on their psyche. The series is quite fond of Nothing Is Scarier, making use of surreal imagery and symbolism, constantly teasing the horrors that may lie in wait just out of sight.

The first four entries in the Silent Hill franchise were developed by an internal team at Konami called "Team Silent", which consisted of "outcast" staff members who had failed to work well on other projects at the studio and had planned to leave the company due to clashing with the creative vision of the studio. The project Konami wanted them to put together was an action Survival Horror game for the PlayStation, overtly in the vein of Resident Evil, as the parent company very transparantly hoped to capitalize on the commercial success Capcom had seen with their zombie-shooting series. But due to the nature of the team's inception and composition, work on the game floundered, with it only progressing after Konami lost faith in the project and decided to mostly leave the team to their own devices rather than cancel the game, thanks to the title's low budget. Team Silent would use the newfound freedom to switch tracks from trying to copy Resident Evil's cheesy action-horror, towards a much more slower-paced, psychological horror experience inspired by director Keiichiro Toyama's interest in the occult and the works of David Lynch. Positive reception to early demos reinvigorated Konami's interest in the project, with the company giving Team Silent more money and personnel to finish the game, which would go on to be a global critical and commercial success; though director Keiichiro Toyama would leave Konami regardless to create the Siren Games franchise at Sony Computer Entertainment.

Following Silent Hill 4, Konami would disband the team in favor of having various Western studios develop new games in the franchise. Many of these installments, especially the spin-off entries, would see mixed critical and fan reception at best, never getting anywhere close to mass acclaim of the original tetralogy. While the last mainline game released in the series was 2012's Silent Hill: Downpour, the last major project in development was Silent Hills, which would have been a collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. Stealth announced via a surprise trailer unlocked at the end of a free, seemingly-unrelated horror game called P.T. in 2014, the project was cancelled after rising tensions between Kojima and Konami over the Metal Gear franchise led to him leaving the company the following year, with the publisher removing the P.T. demo from distribution for good measure. From 2015 to 2021, the franchise was in a limbo, with the only new content being crossovers with other horror games; specifically Dead by Daylight and Dark Deception.

In 2022, however, Konami officially resurrected the franchise when it announced five new projects at once: the interactive streaming series Silent Hill: Ascension, the video games Silent Hill: Townfall and Silent Hill f, a remake of Silent Hill 2, and a movie adaptation of said game entitled Return to Silent Hill.

    open/close all folders 
    Mainline Games 

Team Silent-era

  • Silent Hill 2 remake (PS5/PC, TBA)note 

Other installments

    Side Entries 

Spinoff Games

  • Play Novel: Silent Hill (Game Boy Advance, 2001) — Japan-only visual novel adaptation of Silent Hill 1
  • Silent Hill Mobile (Mobile, 2006) — Japan-only visual novel adaptation of Silent Hill 1
  • Silent Hill: The Arcade (Arcade Rail Shooter, 2007)
  • Silent Hill Orphan (Mobile, 2007) — Point-and-click puzzle game
  • Silent Hill Orphan 2 (Mobile, 2008) — Point-and-click puzzle game
  • Silent Hill The Escape (Mobile, 2008) — Japan-only first-person shooter
  • Silent Hill Orphan 3 (Mobile, 2010) — Point-and-click puzzle game
  • Silent Hill HD Collection (PS3/Xbox 360, 2012) — HD remasters of Silent Hill 2 and 3
  • Silent Hill: Book of Memories (Vita, 2012) - Dungeon crawling action RPG
  • Silent Hills / P.T. (PS4, 2014) — Demo for a cancelled mainline installment
  • Silent Hill: Ascension (2023) — Developed by GenVid, Behavior Interactive, Bad Robot, and dj2 Entertainment

Crossovers

  • Dead by Daylight: Chapter XVI (2020) — DLC for the 2016 horror game Dead by Daylight that serves as non-canonical sequel to Silent Hill 3, featuring elements such as Pyramid Head, Cheryl Mason, and a map based on Midwich Elementary School
  • Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals - Silent Hill (2021) — DLC for the 2018 horror game Dark Deception, featuring The Nurse and Robbie the Rabbit as the monsters and Heather Mason and Cybil Bennett as the mortals, with the map (Silent Sacrifice) based on the appearance of the town in the first game
    Other Media 
Comic Book
  • Silent Hill comic book series
    • Silent Hill: Dying Inside (mini-series, 2003)
    • Silent Hill: Among the Damned (oneshot, 2004)
    • Silent Hill: Paint It Black (oneshot, 2005)
    • Silent Hill: The Grinning Man (oneshot, 2005)
    • Silent Hill: Dead/Alive (mini-series, 2006)
    • Silent Hill: Hunger (mini-series, 2006)
    • Silent Hill: Sinner's Reward (mini-series, 2008)
    • Silent Hill: Past Life (mini-series, 2010)

Film

Character sheets and a Shout Out page are up and running, so feel free to contribute.

This series provides examples of:

    open/close all folders 

    A-C 
  • Abandoned Hospital: A staple of the series — filled with creepy nurses, of course.
    • Subverted in Homecoming, where the game starts in an Abandoned Hospital that is also a Continuity Nod, but it's just a dream. Later on, you can find an item or two on the grounds of the familiar Alchemilla Hospital and it's labeled on the map, but you don't actually go inside.
    • Completely averted in Silent Hill: Downpour, which lacks a hospital level entirely.
  • Abusive Parents: A reoccurring theme throughout the series. From Dahlia keeping her daughter in an And I Must Scream situation in the first game, to Angela being sexually abused by her father and victim blamed by her mother in 2, to the order sacrificing several of their own children in Homecoming.
  • Acrofatic: The Insane Cancers from Silent Hill 3 would trick players into believing they're rather slow — they even get up from serious injuries quite fast and attack.
  • Action Survivor: All the protagonists of the games and movie, presumably to give the audience sympathetic leads from various mundane walks of life. Doublesubverted in Homecoming, with a protagonist who believes himself to be a trained soldier and actually does exhibit some martial prowess, but is in fact a civilian with serious delusions of grandeur, only skilled in combat thanks to training from his strict father.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: Silent Hill Smile Support Society (4S).
  • An Aesop:
    • The first and third games deal with how pain affects us and how integral it is to life. The Order, a nightmarish cult who worships an otherwise divine-looking Sun deity, make use of horrific means to bring their god back to Earth faster. The cult's original leader, Dahlia Gillespie, even sacrificed her own daughter by burning her alive so she'd bear god's fetus in her womb through her constant pain and suffering. But as the third game shows through Heather, the reincarnation of Alessa, suffering doesn't mean you surrender. Even the darkest, most horrible aspects of humanity that we endure aren't the defining factor of what we do and who we become. As Heather and even the game puts it, pain is a part of life that we need to endure, and our ultimate purpose isn't to be in pain, but to find joy.
      Listen, suffering is a fact of life. Either you learn how to deal with that or you go under. You can stay in your own little dream world, but you can't keep hurting other people!
    • Games like Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Downpour take a different approach with their themes: no matter how much you try to escape your sins and traumas, or even if your personal defense mechanisms kick in and you supress everything into your subconscious, eventually you WILL have to face your past and take ownership of your actions. The city beckoned James Sunderland to itself so he'd face the truth about his wife's death, namely the fact that he murdered her after becoming too burdened by her care when she was terminal and felt no more love coming from her at all.
      • Silent Hill 2 also makes it clear through Maria that facing the reality of the situation is better than embracing a falsehood and living in eternal delusion. Artificial happiness will never be as rewarding as truly accepting your own charge and achieving self-actualization. Should James embrace Maria as a real being, denying Mary's presence in his heart and shifting his guilt away, Maria will leave the town with him as she starts to cough, and James' voice tone being harsh and reprimanding when he hears it indicates he'd be very likely to kill her as well.
  • All Just a Dream:
    • Harry is killed in the nightmarish Otherworld at the very beginning of the first game. He then wakes up in the Fog World inside a diner.
    • The worst ending from the first game reveals the entire game to be Harry's Dying Dream.
    • Heather in the third game wakes up in a restaurant just after getting run down by a rollercoaster car in the nightmare, mirroring her father's experience in the first game. Later Heather visits the amusement park for real and narrowly avoids getting hit by the rollercoaster.
    • Played with in the fourth game. The opening sequence initially gives this impression, but it later becomes clear that the player is seeing through the eyes of Joseph Schreiber, Room 302's previous occupant and Walter's 15th victim.
    • Alex in Homecoming wakes up in Travis' semi-trailer truck after being skewered by Pyramid Head's knife in the Nightmare Hospital.
    • The "Hospital" ending of Homecoming.
    • Murphy wakes up from a dream (later revealed to be a flashback) about beating and (possibly) killing Napier at the beginning of Downpour.
  • All There in the Manual: The Book of Lost Memories (1-3), Another Crimson Tome (4), the victim files (4), and the diaries (5). In a sense, the series ironically could provide an inversion of this trope as well as playing it straight, as the additional material sheds a lot of light on the nature of the cult, the history of the town, and the in-game mythology. The inversion comes when you realize that nearly none of the speculation referring to metaphors, symbolism, and the meanings of certain things has ever been confirmed anywhere, yet a great deal of it is accepted as fanon. Mostly, this has been treated with the occasional Shrug of God, but nothing is ever made specific. Arguably, to some, this makes the series even more frightening, as it literally causes you to come to the horrifying conclusions yourself.
  • Alternate Universe: Silent Hill seems to exist on multiple levels: the normal, unhaunted town, a demon-haunted, deserted town, and a nightmarish Dark World. At least, this is how it works in the movie: how many realities there are and how they're connected in the game is the subject of much debate.
  • Always Night: A bit unclear, since the fog makes it just about impossible to see. It's certainly always night in the Dark World. In Silent Hill 3, the game starts off at sunset and stretches over two nights: the daylight portion's spent almost entirely inside an Abandoned Hospital and its Dark World counterpart.
  • And I Must Scream: Several of the monsters, particularly the humanoid ones.
    • Silent Hill 2 is pretty much dominated by these guys; Even Pyramid Head, the most invincible of the bunch, was animated to suggest great pain under his helmet.
    • Downpour: After being beaten to within an inch of his life, Frank Coleridge spends the rest of his life as a vegetable before succumbing to organ failure.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different:
    • In Downpour, the Post-Final Boss sequence has the player in the shoes of the Bogeyman.
    • Also happens in Silent Hill 4, in a sense, although it doesn't really become apparent until later. The very beginning of the game put the players in the shoes of Joseph Schreiber.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes:
    • Starting from Silent Hill 3, you can earn alternate outfits for the player character (or Eileen and Cynthia until her death in the case of Silent Hill 4).
    • Alex and Travis get new outfits for every ending they get in Homecoming and Origins, respectively.
    • Murphy can aquire a new set of clothes for completing a certain sidequest in Downpour.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: The heavier melee weapons (hammer, great knife, mace, etc.) and the hunting rifle, particularly in the second game (can't move with it drawn, too slow to fire and reload, only useful for the last two bosses). In the hands of a skilled player, though, the hammer is one of the better melee weapons available.
  • Bad Samaritan: In the first game, Dahlia turns out to be a dark version of this trope. To a first time player, she seems enigmatic and obtuse, but her advice and clues tend to steer you onto a path to progression regardless. That she turns out to be pure evil after Harry has given her the benefit of the doubt is a pivotal point in the plot.
  • Beware of Hitchhiking Ghosts: Alessa is the apparition whose sudden appearance causes a car crash in the beginning of Silent Hill and its film the movie, and causes Travis to stop his truck at the beginning of Silent Hill: Origins.
  • Boss Warning Siren: An air raid siren sounds just before the town shifts from fogbound to otherworld.
  • Bottomless Pits: Usually used as an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence, but you can fall to your death down them in harder difficulties in Silent Hill 3.
  • Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Done visually - some truly horrendous sights are scattered around Silent Hill with such subtlety that you can pass right by them if you don't slow down and examine your surroundings.
  • Breakable Weapons:
    • Silent Hill 4 has the golf clubs that hog inventory space after they break. There was also the wine bottle, which actually became a slightly better weapon after it broke (though it was still quite weak).
    • Every non-special weapon in Silent Hill: Origins is breakable.
    • Played with in Downpour, as while the melee weapons break after prolonged use you can use the metal parts of objects as more durable weapons.
  • Chainsaw Good: Usually a bonus weapon in the series, although its usefulness varies from game to game.
  • Chaos Architecture: The few times in the series when you can return to a location that was visited previously, it's usually different, sometimes radically so. Even though the town looks abandoned, it seems that there's still life in it in some way, as if you're in some sort of shadow-dimension mimicking the real world. However, this trope is averted for the most part, until Origins, all recurring areas have the same map layout, with the only difference being item placement.
  • Children Are Innocent: Why Laura locked you in a room full of monsters in 2; children can't enter the Otherworld and therefore can't see the monsters. Though Alessa and Cheryl can see monsters in the first game but it's justified since Alessa being forced to birth the Order's God is what's creating all of them in the first place and Cheryl is the other half of Alessa's soul.
  • Closed Circle: Played straight most of the time, except in 2 and Homecoming. In 2, the player can pretty much always backtrack to the starting area with James's car, but James himself refuses to leave until he finds out what happened to his wife. The developers stated that they made the path from the parking lot to the town in 2 "so long that you wouldn't want to go back". In Homecoming, you can backtrack almost anywhere, but occasionally you're trapped in an area until you find the exit; similar to the second game, the character simply refuses to leave until he's found the person he's looking for.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • In the Silent Hill 2 bonus scenario "Born From a Wish" (which shows Maria's point of view just before she meets James), Harry's name is written on a dumpster as graffiti.
    • In Silent Hill 3, Heather will stumble across Harry's notes in the exact style of the Silent Hill save points just before the last section of the game. She will also comment that there are "no letters for dead wives" in the apartment mailboxes, and refuse to search a toilet for an item, both references to Silent Hill 2; while driving her to Silent Hill, Detective Cartland mentions working on a missing persons case in the town, likely referring to James Sunderland.
    • The UFO endings of each game typically have some nod to the previous games (see below).
    • Homecoming has some interesting nods with its achievements. Beating a Feral is Eddie's Legacy, using health-enhancing Serum for the first time is Kaufmann's Handiwork, beating a Siam is Shades of James, refusing to forgive your father is Angela's Choice, and beating the game on Hard means The Old Gods haven't left this place.
    • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is full of these, mostly to the original game, but also to 2, 3, and Origins.
    • The plot of the fourth game and The Arcade are based around minor articles from the second game about Walter Sullivan and The Little Baroness.
  • Couldn't Find a Pen: Ink is at a premium in Silent Hill, because everyone writes in blood.
  • Conveniently Interrupted Document: These show up through out the games, most notably in 2, Origins and Downpour. Normally what's obscured is the name of the character who the document refers to, as the game reveals their background bit by bit.
    That creep's sure to show up soon.
  • Creepy Doll:
    • Various bloodied dolls are scattered about Silent Hill in 1 and 3.
    • Silent Hill 2 has a creepy voodoo doll apparently left by an insane prisoner, and although it's not strictly a doll, there's a ruined, creepily-staring teddy bear sitting outside what is implied to be Angela's sealed-off childhood bedroom.
    • In Silent Hill 3, Heather finds various dolls next to diary entries written by a Brookhaven Hospital patient with a crush on her.
    • Silent Hill 3 also introduces Lakeside Amusement Park mascot Robbie the Rabbit, who reappears in 4 and Homecoming.
    • Before the end boss in Silent Hill 3, Heather notices some old dolls in Alessa's bedroom and remarks that one of their names is Scarlet.
    • In Silent Hill 4, Walter gives one to Henry that causes an additional apparition to appear by his chestbox.
    • In Homecoming, Scarlet's dolls and herself during her boss fight.
    • The Doll monsters in Downpour. Then hilariously subverted by the sex doll... The mannequins that send shadow monsters at you while crying, moaning, and laughing however...
  • Critical Existence Failure:
    • Averted in Shattered Memories, where Harry noticeably starts limping more and more when he's been tackled enough times.
    • Also averted in Downpour, where Murphy will hold his side and limp after taking a large amount of damage.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death:
    • Happens fairly often, but one of the most notable is Richard getting slowly electrified to death in 4. Made all the more unnerving by him still trying to talk as he dies. Jasper's death earlier is just as unusual, in that he's apparently being possessed and forced, not only to burn himself with a candle, but also to carve "17/21" on his own chest.
    • Homecoming has Judge Holloway impaled through the jaw with the same electric drill she tortured Alex with.
    • The Movie features Anna getting skinned alive, Cybil getting slowly burned alive (in full-on gory detail), and Christabella being ripped in half with Alessa's living barbed wire - after it has punched through her crotch and come out through her mouth. Ouch.
    • Murphy's son was beaten, raped, and then mutilated. Later on, Murphy gets to watch another boy's neck get snapped, and it takes a LONG time to occur.
  • Cutscene Incompetence:
    • Henry breaking his arm at the end of the Good ending or getting possessed by Walter in the "21 Sacraments" Ending.
    • A few of the instant deaths that happen to Heather in Silent Hill 3. Though to trigger some of them, the player usually has to make some particularily bone-headed decisions themselves such as walk off the back of a moving train or willingly try to cross a gap after being told that there's something patrolling underneath it.

    D-L 
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: While the first three games all had pretty much the same controls, the fact that most of the games afterwards were developed by different studios means that each game has its own control scheme. It's usually not too bad, but playing several of the games in succession can throw you off. 4 in particular had very distinct controls from the rest of the games.
  • Dark World:
    • The alternate, dark and evil(er) Silent Hill with the air raid sirens and the (tougher) monsters and screaming and blood and the running and the huge gaping holes of fire and rusty steel grating. And hot, demon-on-demon rape action. And breathing organic walls with heartbeats. And... many other things. *shudder*
    • Shattered Memories changes up the formula a bit by making the Dark World be covered in ice rather than rust and blood. And indestructible monsters.
  • Deadly Lunge: A favourite attack of the simian-type monsters such as Rompers and Mumblers. The Numb Bodies in 3 do this as well.
  • Dead All Along:
    • Lisa. She is pretty much the same as the Puppet Nurses that stalk the hospital. She retains some of her humanity, as Alessa remembers her as an odd yet kindhearted nurse, but begins to gradually lose it once Alessa's captured by Dahlia.
    • Harry himself is one of these in the worst ending.
    • A major part of The Reveal in Silent Hill: Homecoming reveals this to be true of Alex's little brother, Joshua.
    • From Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Harry died in a car crash more than a decade ago. Which is also how he died in the worst ending of the original Silent Hill. Hmmmmm...
  • Dead Man Honking: The [non-canon] Bad ending reveals that Harry never survived the car crash at the beginning of the story, as shown by him slumped over the steering wheel while the horn continuously blares.
  • Death of a Child: To hell and back. Out of all the children introduced in the series, only one or two actually survive to see the end of the games they are in.
  • Demonic Possession: Room 302 in the fourth game; around the halfway point, it slowly becomes possessed with "hauntings", which will hurt Henry if he stays too close to them, as well as affect which ending you get, depending on your vigilance in exorcising them.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: At least half the games end with the hero confronting and defeating some incarnation of the "God" that the cult worships (which may be prematurely born each time, or simply not really a god at all). Heather even makes a dour remark about it in the third game:
    Heather: It must not have been much of a god if it could be killed by a human being.
  • Distress Call:
    • James gets a letter from his dead wife to kick off the second game. He also gets calls from her on the radio after he picks it up and after watching the tape in the hotel.
    • In the first game, Harry gets a wall of department store televisions with the same image of his own daughter asking where he is. She says the same thing on the phone in the alternate school.
    • Likewise, early on in Homecoming, Alex receives a call for help on his radio intended for somebody else.
    • In the fourth, Henry gets a call on his disconnected phone from Cynthia after losing her mere moments after agreeing to an Escort Mission.
    • Harry gets these quite frequently in Shattered Memories - including one that was, surprisingly, not from Cheryl.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: In quite a few places. Of noteworthy mention is Pyramid Head, who eventually gets a long, jagged spear with which to penetrate his victims. He goes on to penetrate Maria.
  • Driving Question: At least one per game, usually in the form of "What the hell is going on?" and/or "Have you seen X?" The first game even lampoons it in the bonus UFO ending, as the first thing Harry starts to say to the aliens is "have you seen a little girl around here" (they stun him before he can finish).
  • Drone of Dread: The air raid sirens signify an impending world-shift.
  • Dual-World Gameplay: Done with a Dark World. Transition points between worlds are generally not under the player's control, except in Origins.
  • Dull Surprise:
    • The voice actors sometimes don't emote very strongly compared to the horrors their characters are facing, and the animators often choose not to give the cast a wide variety of facial features. Henry from SH4 in particular is considered the worst offender, as he reacts to his situation with nothing more than a mild "What the hell?"
    • The instruction manual for SH4 lampshades this quirk of Henry's: "he never shows his emotions," indeed!
    • Completely averted in Alex's case, who reacts with the appropriate (and usually sweary) exclamations and facial expressions. ("Oh, you gotta be shitting me!")
    • Downpour also averts this now - Murphy is considered the most identifiable protagonist thus far in the series due to how frequently he screams, swears, and just generally exclaims out of fear, surprise, and confusion.
  • Earn Your Happy Ending: In most of the games, you have to go out of your way to get the very best ending.
  • Eldritch Location: In addition to the town itself, there are also several specific areas throughout the series. Some examples include "Nowhere" in the first game and the Silent Hill Historical Society in the second. The fourth game is basically framed around trying to escape from such a place, which just happens to be your apartment.
  • Empty Room Psych: Some rooms contain no monsters, items, or any of the fun Silent Hill surprises.
  • End-Game Results Screen: Most of the earlier games give you a ranking between one and ten stars after the credits. The ranking you got sometimes also determines the power of the game's secret weapons in a subsequent playthrough.
  • Enemy-Detecting Radar: The radio is an audio version, but it's nigh-useless — it tells you how far away the monsters are depending on the intensity of the noise, but not from which direction.
  • Escape from the Crazy Place: The premise of the fourth game and how the player feels in the others.
  • Escort Mission: Protecting Maria in 2, Elle in Homecoming, and Eileen in 4. Eileen's is the worst, since the ending you get depends in part on how much she got attacked throughout the whole freaking game. The more she's been attacked, the faster she'll walk towards Walter's death machine, making it nigh-impossible to beat Walter before she's killed if she's been beaten up badly.
  • Establishing Series Moment: As the first game's Nightmare Fuel page puts it, early in the game after roaming around empty fog-choked streets for a few minutes you explore down a dingy alleyway which twists and turns, walking through a large puddle of blood until you find a skinned and mutilated corpse strung up on a grid of barbed-wire. Turning around, you find yourself swarmed by shadowy childlike figures wielding knives and dragged to the ground, before jerking awake on a seat in the diner, your horrific experience having been All Just a Dream... Or Was It a Dream? This iconic opening sequence instantly set the tone for the entire franchise.
  • Everybody's Dead, Dave: The town is mostly devoid of human life, except for the typically small cast of characters the player meets.
  • The Everyman: The protagonists tend towards this. The original game's Harry Mason couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. (His successors have improved aim.)
  • Everything Trying to Kill You:
    • It's hard to think of a better instance of this than an entire freaking town.
    • Most obvious in the third game, where Heather can fall to her death via ladders and holes. Certain unique parts have:
      • The Bloody Mirror Room Death Trap.
      • The insta-kill red fog during the escape from the amusement park's haunted house.
      • The hallway that suddenly turns to meat in a New Game Plus.
    • In the fourth game, after Henry's apartment becomes haunted, the walls, furniture, and fridge (among other things) can harm you.
  • Evil Is Visceral: Many of the monsters are based on this — if not visually, then with their sound effects. A theme of rust and blood pervades the Otherworld. A notable exception is Silent Hill 2, which opted instead for mold and urban decay. Shattered Memories is another thing again.
  • Failure Is the Only Option: In the Otherworld sequence at the very beginning of the first game, you have to let the enemies "kill" Harry in order to continue. Trying to escape doesn't work, as the only escape route is blocked off. Done again in the third game, when it's his daughter's turn to encounter Silent Hill.
  • Fanservice: Very rare for the series, but there are a few examples.
    • In the fourth game, Eileen's extra outfit has her wearing a very skimpy nurse costume. Cynthia also has an extra outfit which further accentuates her assets (if you don't immediately approach her and trigger the introductory cutscene with her while she's in her costume, she's even dancing!) Both outfits come complete with Jiggle Physics.
    • Not within the game itself, but on the third game soundtrack album's cover, there's a picture of Heather wearing her trademark white sleeveless vest, but without the orange shirt she usually wears inside it, instead showing off her cleavage.
  • Fetus Terrible:
    • Heather/Alessa is pregnant with the cult's God in 3. She has to use the Aglaophotis secretly stored inside her necklace for her body to reject it, causing her to vomit it out. And then Claudia proceeds to swallow the aborted fetus and become the new bearer of the god.
    • Done bizarrely in Homecoming, where Amnion is "pregnant" with the corpse of Alex's dead little brother, Joshua. Whether this is ultimately a positive experience for Alex or very, very bad depends on the ending received.
  • Finishing Stomp: Every protagonist can do this. Whether you actually need to varies with the game.
  • Fission Mailed: A staple of the Silent Hill series. 1, 3, and Homecoming start out with a nightmarish sequence that turns out to be a dream for each respective player character.
  • 555:
    • All the phone numbers in The Room and Shattered Memories.
    • Averted with the Konami help line in Shattered Memories. That really is their number.
  • Footprints of Muck: Stepping in monster remains results in the player character leaving a trail of bloody footprints. Some games even keep track of the length of said trail.
  • Foreshadowing: All part of the Mind Screw, though most of it isn't obvious until subsequent playthroughs:
    • "Know what you're shooting, and don't go blasting me by mistake!" Spoken by hot cop Cybil, who gets possessed and will have to be killed if you don't have the red liquid to exorcise her.
    • The bits and pieces of what James gets about what happened to Mary before The Reveal.
    • The recurring headaches and flashbacks Heather gets as the third game progresses.
    • The numbers carved on the victims' chests in the fourth game and the corresponding increase in the bloody handprints on the wall. Plus, one of the hauntings can be Henry, with 21/21 carved in his neck staring through the eye-hole on the outside of the door.
    • A recording in Homecoming has Alex's dad stating that Alex doesn't always see things the way they are. The first dog enemy also receives a lot of foreshadowing, starting with the empty dog house in their backyard.
    • Shattered Memories is full of this, right down to the names of the enemies. Raw Shocks = Rorschach, as in a Rorschach test. You are literally trying to fight off the therapy Cheryl is receiving (or perhaps fighting off the resistance she is giving to the therapy itself?)
    • In Downpour, the series-wide motif of abandoned wheelchairs foreshadow Frank Coleridge's fate.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: In the Silent Team quartet, Silent Hill 2 is actually quite different in terms of plot and theme to 1, 3 and 4. The other games all revolve around a heavy theme of the occult, with 1 and 3 directly involving confrontations with a cult that is involved in the hellish creatures/Dark World of the games and 4 being about the fallout of a twisted occult ritual performed by a Serial Killer. 2, however, involves a more introspective sort of horror, with its famous focus on "repressed memories/hidden guilt".
  • Gaiden Game:
    • The Silent Hill Play Novel revolves around Cybil's adventures in Silent Hill during the course of the first game. The game's not referenced by the rest of the series and generally isn't considered canonical, though.
    • Supposedly, The Room was originally meant to be one, before being integrated into the main series early in production.
  • Genius Loci: The town itself is arguably alive. More than alive, the town's image is unique to its inhabitants, reflecting upon their personality and past experiences, good or bad.
  • Ghost Town:
    • An unclear example, actually. No one outside of the town ever says it's abandoned, but we never find out just where the hell the townsfolk are. One very popular idea is that there's an unseen "level" of the gameverse town that's normal and inhabited (an idea that, at the least, makes the most sense for the prequel game Silent Hill: Origins). The movie and comic books present Silent Hill as being completely abandoned, although they disagree on whether the "foggy" town is reality.
    • The concept of Silent Hill itself for the movie version is originally based off of the real-life ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which was abandoned after the coal mines beneath the town were accidentally set on fire. Centralia inspiration and backstory only applies to the movie adaptation and is not related to the games with the exception of Homecoming, which twists many elements of the movie into its own narrative and canon.
  • Giant Mook: The Large Numb Bodies in the third game.
  • God Is Evil: Appropriately enough for the particularly heinous and barbaric methods used to summon God.
  • The Greys: The aliens that show up in the UFO Endings.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • While most of the puzzles have in-game clues, it's still nigh-impossible to get some of the endings without consulting a walkthrough.
    • Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill: Origins avert this by having the canonical ending be impossible to avoid on the first play-through.
    • Special shoutout to the hard mode puzzles in 3, which require you to have a working knowledge of Shakespeare's tragedies, know a specific fact about a particular species of bird, and be able to intuit that a morbid love-poem that involved mutilating the protagonist's face is supposed to represent keys on a keypad. Though even possessing such knowledge may not help much.
  • Hair-Raising Hare: Robbie the Rabbit. Especially in his reappearance in 4 — visible from the peephole allowing Henry to see inside Eileen's room. After Eileen is attacked by Walter, when you look into the peephole again, Robbie is now pointing accusingly at you!
  • Hand in the Hole:
  • Happier Home Movie:
  • Happily Adopted:
    • Cheryl, who was found on the roadside by Harry and his wife. Harry adopts Cheryl again by the end of the first game.
    • Laura in the "Leave" ending of the second game, perhaps.
  • The Heartless: Silent Hill's hideous inhabitants.
  • Hellevator: JAAAAAAAAAMES SUNDERLAND! The first game had two examples of this trope, as well.
  • Hell Is That Noise: Radio static (Detected by your handheld radio) is a common sign that monsters are nearby, which often means that while you're battling all sorts of nasty sights, you're also suffering through being bombarded by radio static.
    • Those sounds in the courtyard of the school in the first game.
    • The movie has this in spades: The banshee-shrieking of the burned children; the gurgling, labored breathing of the armless man; the tormented yells of Colin the janitor; the quiet pained whimpers and gasps that the bubble head nurses make, coupled with the wet popping and tearing of their joints whenever they move; and the infamous scraping sound of the Great Knife... watch the movie on your computer with your headphones in and see if the sound effects don't put up the hairs on the back of your neck.
    • And we can't forget the infamous air raid siren.
  • Hollywood Darkness: All sequels with a flashlight mechanic play this straight, as you can still see enough in dark areas to navigate reasonably well with your light turned off, and cranking up the brightness allows you to see pretty much see uninhibited. Averted in the 1999 original, where objects in close proximity gain a faint blue outline, but otherwise everything is bathed in inky darkness, and turning up the brightness just turns the black into equally-obscuring charcoal grey.
  • Hotter and Sexier:
    • Dahlia gets quite the makeover in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. The developers says this was done on purpose to cue players in that things are not what they seem.
    • In that game, Cybil may also be a Stripperific cop, depending on what choices the player makes.
  • Human Sacrifice: A recurring theme except for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters: In any of the games (including the films), the members of the Order are shown to be more evil than any of the monsters in the town.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal:
    • Almost every protagonist in the series is capable of carrying an array of knives, holy swords, stamina drinks, and keys with only the clothes on their backs.
    • Since Origins features breakable items, this means that Travis is often stashing quite a number of improbable weapons in his vests. It also introduces heavy throw weapons, so Travis is running around with not only several pipes and blunt objects, but also portable TVs and microwaves.
    • Somewhat averted in 4, where Henry is given a limited inventory system and has to play around with it in order to progress.
    • Averted for the most part in Shattered Memories. All Harry has are the clothes on his back, the flashlight, his cell phone, and any memento he can lay his grubby little hands on.
    • Averted in Downpour. Murphy can only carry one melee weapon at a time and will have to swap for particular weapons needed for puzzles.
  • Iconic Sequel Character: Pyramid Head was introduced in the second game, and has since become a iconic part of the series appearing in both movies.
  • Idle Animation: Every protagonist has one or two.
    • Henry's will change depending on his equipped weapon.
    • In the second game, James will strike a pose reminiscent of Ash in Evil Dead II if you're holding the chainsaw and - according to some - standing over a dead enemy. He'll laugh/yell, too. It's unsettling if you've had to set the controller down to concentrate on something else for a minute.
    • Even some monsters have a version of this. Downpour's Screamer monster hits herself, cries, and makes a rocking motion as if cradling a baby when the player is at a distance.
  • I Don't Like the Sound of That Place
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Judge Holloway in Homecoming, when Alex impales her through the jaw with her own electric drill.
  • Implacable Man: Red Pyramid a.k.a. Pyramid Head until the end. Walter counts as well.
  • Improvised Weapon: All of the characters get kitchen knives or boxcutters, everyone gets a pipe, and most get hammers, fire axes, and other tools.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle: Starting from Silent Hill 4 onwards (except for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories), player characters have limited inventory slots.
  • Infinite Flashlight: There's a certain moment in Silent Hill 2 in which James's flashlight battery dies on him - it is part of a puzzle. Otherwise, played straight throughout the series.
  • In Name Only: Besides the setting and some rather ham-handed references, all the comics written by Scott Ciencin have very little in common with the games.
  • Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: Everywhere you go, you are blocked by doors with broken locks, police barricades, and points where you can't proceed unless you have the right MacGuffin.
    • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has used the relative lack of these as a selling point. But it's still not a Wide-Open Sandbox.
    • There are so many of these, infact, that it should be its own trope of having an inexplicably large number of locked doors. This has carried on into other games that are non-silent hill franchise. Silent Hill Doors indeed.
  • Interface Spoiler: The HD collection versions of the second and third game do not have any of the trophies/achievements hidden, including ones that identify the names of the games' bosses. Arguably examples of Late-Arrival Spoiler.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: While in some titles you can get a gist of what is going on just by playing them, some details (major or not) are never explicitly told to the player, you can only piece together the entire plot by playing through the game multiple times, reading the notes you find, examining the locations, getting multiple endings, etc.
  • Journey to the Center of the Mind: One of the basic premises of the series. It's hinted that the town itself has the power to manifest people's personal demons literally. So we're treated to Alessa's mental landscape in the first game, James's in the second, a weird mashup of Alessa's and Claudia's in the third, Walter Sullivan's in the fourth, Travis's with some of Alessa's in Origins, Alex and the parents of Shepherd's Glen in Homecoming, and Murphy's in Downpour.
  • Katanas Are Just Better: Crops up as a Justified Trope — see Improvised Weapon above. It isn't a perfect weapon however, as it has shorter reach.
  • Karmic Death:
    • In Silent Hill, Dahlia gets fried by the very god she was trying to summon, and Kaufmann, if you saved him earlier, gets dragged to hell by Lisa.
    • Done rather bizarrely in Silent Hill 2 when the twin Pyramid Heads commit suicide on their own weapons once James comes to terms with the truth.
    • In Silent Hill 3:
      • Vincent insults Claudia, ordering Heather to kill "this demon", and earns a knife in the back with a cry of "you'll go to hell!"
      • Claudia also earns one, by ingesting the fetal God Heather vomited up, intending to birth it herself. Considering that she fostered the God's growth by subjecting Heather to horror and hatred, the fact that Claudia's literally left as a smear on the ground could qualify.
    • In Silent Hill 4, Andrew DeSalvo is locked into a cell of the prison where he had acted as its sadistic warden, and later is brutally murdered by one of its former prisoners, Walter Sullivan.
    • In Silent Hill: Homecoming, Judge Holloway has her own electric drill shoved through the bottom of her jaw after torturing Alex with it.
    • Implied in Silent Hill: Downpour. In the "Truth & Justice" ending, Anne, armed with a gun, confronts Sewell after learning that Sewell murdered her father.
  • Last-Minute Reprieve: Murphy Pendleton, the protagonist of Silent Hill: Downpour, is spared from execution when his transport bus runs into one of Silent Hill's trademarked massive road fissures.
  • Layered World: The games have transitions between four dimensions: the real world, the fog world, Otherworld, and the dimension with the final boss fight or psychological confrontation (which the Japanese materials call "Unknown", but the fandom calls "Nowhere"). These layers exist as player experience, even if some game endings are All Just a Dream rather than Another Dimension or Pocket Dimension. Air raid sirens signal a shift from Fog World to Otherworld. Foghorns are heard when shifting from Otherworld to the Nowhere dimension.
  • The Lethal Connotation of Guns and Others: In most games, you face an armed human as a boss fight. In all cases, being shot by them hurts much more than your typical monster attack, enough to drop your health to critically low in certain cases.
  • Lost in Imitation:
    • As mentioned above, Silent Hill 2 is both very different to the other three games in the original quartet and the most popular of them. Consequently, ever since Team Silent split up, other designers who have worked on Silent Hill games have tried to emulate 2 more than the other three.
    "[My favorite SH game is] Silent Hill 2. I didn’t really care for all the heavy occult based storyline in SH 1 and 3. I felt SH 2 had the best stand alone storyline, and provided the best atmosphere of all the SH games by far. I find all the in’s and out’s of ‘The Order’ to be overly intricate and rather uninteresting, but that’s just my opinion." - Devin Shatsky (producer, Shattered Memories, Downpour), in an interview with Hell's Descent (Nov 5, 2010).

    M-Z 
  • Malevolent Architecture: In addition to being alive, Silent Hill is quite the sadistic entity.
  • Marionette Motion: The nurses move like this, which adds to their disturbing value. This is particularly noticeable in the very first rendition of the nurses, who are supposed to be controlled by the parasites growing out of their backs.
  • Mascot Villain: Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2, though his fame has also made him a mascot for the series as a whole.
  • Meaningful Name: Raw Shocks, the monsters in Shattered Memories.
  • Mirror Boss: Almost every game has a single boss that fights like a human rather than a mindless monster. The first game has Puppet Cybil, the second game has Eddie, the third game has the Memory of Alessa, the fourth game has Walter Sullivan's manifestation, Homecoming has the Order Soldiers and Curtis, and Downpour has Anne.
  • Mind Rape: Silent Hill's stock in trade.
  • Mind Screw: The major premise of the series.
  • Mood Whiplash: The HD Collection was partly developed by Hijinx Studio. Seeing their jolly logo in the start screen doesn't sit very well with the drama and unpleasant weirdness that follows.
  • Moon Logic Puzzle: As Zero Punctuation put it, a lot of the game involves trying various interpretations of keys on various interpretations of doors.
  • Multiple Endings: Some of which are bittersweet at best, real downers, or pure comedy. In general, they are determined by whether you did two things in the game. If you did none of them, you get the absolute worst ending. If you did one of them, you'll get a bittersweet ending. If you did both, you get the best ending.
  • New Game Plus: Usually entails a whole slew of bonus weapons.
  • No Canon for the Wicked: The series usually follows this, with the occasional exception.
    • Silent Hill - The third game follows either of the best endings, where both Harry and Cheryl escape the town. In the best ending, Cybil survives as well, but according to developers, she dies. Maybe. Played with in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which is a remake of the game, but explicitly remaking the worst ending, where Harry dies in a car wreck and the entire game was a dying dream.
    • The game's director claims that Cybil living is the true ending. So this is either averted or played straight depending on which you subscribe to.
    • Silent Hill 2 - James's fate isn't stated for certain, but in the fourth game, his father notes that he and his wife disappeared after visiting Silent Hill.
    • Silent Hill 3 - The fifth game reveals that not only did Douglas survive, he also took down most of The Cult. Which is actually a perfect lead into Homecoming when it is revealed that Judge Holloway is trying to restore the Order, albeit mostly for the sake of breaking the curse that is on Shepherd's Glen, though she does take a certain... glee in torturing Alex and does not care at all about having her daughter tortured and murdered as well.
    • Silent Hill: Origins - The main character Travis makes a brief cameo at the beginning of Homecoming.
  • No Communities Were Harmed: The movie's ash-filled setting is inspired by the real-life town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. The whole community of Centralia was mostly abandoned decades ago when the coal mines beneath the town were accidentally set on fire. To this day, smoke billows up from the ground and scientists estimate that the mines will continue to burn for at least another 250 years. Even the local highway, PA Route 61, has been closed down due to the mine fires cracking through the asphalt.
  • No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: Many outdoor areas, where the player is herded along a linear path from Point A to Point B by locked doors, impassable roadblocks and Bottomless Pits, as well as the Abandoned Hospital in most games, and the alternate mall, sewers, and amusement park in the third game. Made worse by dead-end rooms that don't contain anything important but ammo-consuming Goddamned Bats. While you could wander about outside, you'll eventually run out of ammo and get killed.
  • Non-Standard Game Over:
    • Harry meets a gruesome death by tentacle if he fails to use an item before proceeding in the original.
    • Heather, in keeping up the family tradition, meets the same fate if she crosses a bridge without first dealing with the tentacle residing in the sewer muck.
    • Heather births the God if she tries to shoot Claudia near the end of SH3.
    • In SH2, if Maria is killed before she's supposed to die, including during the chase immediately before her first Plotline Death cutscene, it's Game Over. And sometimes, when James is killed during the Hanger boss battle, the creatures lift him into the ceiling.
  • Notice This: Starting with the second game, the characters will look at any and all objects they can pick up in the area. They also look at monsters.
    • The 8th game, Downpour, lacks this feature.
  • Offing the Offspring: In addition to all of the instances of attempted Human Sacrifice, Travis's mother becomes convinced that Travis has been replaced by a demon and tries to commit murder-suicide.
    • In Homecoming, it's revealed that Alex's parents had intended to drown him as a sacrifice as required by the town's pact with the Order's God. There's the other founding families of Shepherd's Glen who murdered their own children as part of said pact, whether through dismemberment, entombment, or asphyxiation as directed. Two of those same children who died end up coming back later as horrific monstrosities to kill their parents in revenge.
    • A sidequest in Downpour reveals that a woman indirectly but deliberately caused her severely autistic daughter to drown.
    • The worst ending of Downpour has Murphy as Charlie's murderer, which would push Murphy into Unreliable Narrator status. Not a lot of players consider this ending as canonical, though.
  • Old Save Bonus: Having a Silent Hill 2 save file on the same memory card as Silent Hill 3 gives you a couple of extra scenes:
    • Inspecting a mailbox will net a joke about having no mail, not even a letter for a dead wife.
    • Inspecting the rail on the top of the roof will get a comment about how unsafe the whole thing looks.
    • A cutscene in which Heather will approach a filthy toilet to retrieve an item, but recoil and wonder out loud who would do such a disgusting thing.
    • The nightclub in Silent Hill will have a poster advertising performances by Maria.
  • Ominous Fog: Originally used in the first game as a cover for the technical limitations at the time. Has since become a staple of the series, in spite of improved technology.
  • Ominous Chanting: Heard, for example, during the Split Worm battle, and during the Possessed Ending cutscene of SH3. Sepulcher's boss battle features this as well.
  • One-Steve Limit: The Pyramid Head of Homecoming is officially named the Bogeyman; a different monster in Downpour is also known as the Bogeyman.
    • SH4 has Frank Sunderland; Downpour has Frank Coleridge.
    • SH4 has Richard Braintree; Origins has Richard Grady.
    • Surname example: James's wife Mary's maiden name is Shepherd, which she shares with Alex and his family. The developers state that there's no relation.
  • Optional Stealth: In dark areas of all games where you have a flashlight. Going dark makes you practically imperceptible to normal monsters, allowing you to either come close and whack them to death or just sneak past altogether. The games sure don't stop you from bum-rushing into all places with the torch on, however, and depending on how much health supplies and ammo you have, it's also a very valid way to play.
  • Our Monsters Are Weird: Most of the monsters run on this trope, usually combined with Nightmare Fuel.
  • Painting the Medium: Along with providing telephone voiceover via the Wii Remote's speaker, Harry's in-game cell phone's battery meter in Shattered Memories will match the Remote's current charge.
  • Papa Wolf: Harry Mason. He'll go To Hell and Back for his little girl. The third game reveals that he outright killed a cult member to keep Cheryl safe.
    • Murphy Pendleton. His response to Patrick Napier sexually assaulting and murdering his son Charlie is to get himself arrested and put in prison with Napier so he can exact his revenge.
  • Path of Greatest Resistance: Occasionally, it can be easy to get turned around or unsure of which direction to go. When you are attacked by one of those damned nurses when you open a door, you know that yep, this is the way.
  • Perverse Puppet: Scarlet from Homecoming is a gigantic, deformed porcelain doll whose body is made of flesh-like plastic, with crude and bloodied limbs; the more she's hit, the more her body becomes scarred akin to mutilation. She's the manifestation of a little girl named Scarlet Fitch, who died via dismemberment as part of Shepherd's Glen's required Human Sacrifice. Her father, Dr. Fitch, who did the deed, was so guilt-ridden by what he did to his own daughter that he tried to atone for his sin by constantly cutting himself the same way he did Scarlet. He dies a Karmic Death when Scarlet herself manifests as the doll-like monstrosity Alex encounters and bites off her father's head.
  • The Place: The entire series is titled Silent Hill.
  • Point-and-Click Game: The Cell Phone spinoffs.
  • Police Are Useless: Generally averted. 1, 3, Homecoming and to a lesser extent Shattered Memories all have policemen/women as secondary protagonists. Downpour has one as a dogged Anti-Villain. In 2, the monsters are Invisible to Normals, and in 4, the police succeed in capturing Walter Sullivan. Not mentioned in Origins.
  • Premiseville: Silent Hill, Wherever It Is.
  • Purgatory and Limbo: The town is a kind of fog-covered no-place in which the main characters are faced with horrific Jacob's Ladder-esque Body Horror monsters/demons, manifestations of someone's crimes, failings, and regrets, and their actions and choices in-game determining whether they escape, remain trapped in the town, or die there.
    'Tis doubt which leadeth thee to Purgatory.
  • Rape as Backstory: Angela in Silent Hill 2, Alessa in the movie.
  • Recurring Riff:
    • Several of the riffs from the first game's opening theme recur throughout the series.
    • Silent Hill 2 does this the most with its own soundtrack, eg. Theme Of Laura, White Noiz, Forest (Angela's theme, also heard combined with Promise, etc.), Null Moon (sort of Maria's theme, reprised in Fermata In Mystic Air), and Promise (itself based on the series's main theme).
    • Dahlia (Claw Finger and Never Again) and Kaufmann's themes from the first game. The music played when Lisa dies is a variation on the series theme.
    • The main theme of the first game is the basis for "Hometown", Silent Hill 3's ending credits song.
    • A melodic line from "Theme of Laura" from Silent Hill 2 is used in a guitar solo in "Waiting for You" from Silent Hill 4.
    • Part of the guitar solo from "I Want Love (Studio Mix)" from 3 reappears in both "Your Rain" from 4 and "Hell Frozen Rain" from Shattered Memories.
  • Road Runner PC: Outdoor segments are a breeze, as enemies aren't particularly speedy. The most irksome ones are the air screamers, one of the only (to-date) airborne enemies, and difficult to outrun.
  • Rule of Symbolism: Each of the monsters in Silent Hill represent the subconscious fears and issues of those around, and tie into a general theme. The first game's monsters relate to childhood fears, for example, 2's monsters have a theme of suffocation, and Homecoming invokes drowning with its monsters.
  • Running Gag: Games in the series with Multiple Endings usually have at least one uncharacteristically goofy ending, typically involving aliens and/or a suspiciously intelligent shiba inu dog.
  • Say My Name: Got a missing loved one? Your Escort Mission ally is in danger? In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, you can even call for Cheryl whenever you feel like it.
  • Scare Chord: In some parts of SH2, it takes the form of a high-pitched screeching or ringing noise.
  • Scenery Gorn: The Otherworld is full of rust, blood, and decay. And true to the tagline, there are a lot of wall-mounted corpses in this series.
  • Sensor Suspense: The radio starts playing static as dark things draw near. Silent Hill 4 instead uses this to indicate that the room is haunted.
  • Sensory Overload: The games, especially the first 3, love to overwhelm you with loud, clattering, metallic industrial sounds, as well as the almost perpetual static from your radio and the uncanny sounds the monsters make, all to help unnerve the player.
  • School Uniforms are the New Black: Alessa is usually seen wearing her school uniform.
  • Second Hour Superpower: The static-emitting radios are all obtained rather early in the games, typically just before or just after your first monster encounter.
  • Self-Inflicted Hell: Although the hell is less self-inflicted, and more the town itself actively customizing its horrors to fit the people who enter. In Silent Hill 2 especially, the town is essentially Hell on Earth.
  • Shout-Out: The first four games take heavy inspiration and make many references to works by Stephen King, David Lynch, and other known horror authors and directors. Special mention goes to the 1990 film Jacob's Ladder for its influence holding the heaviest presence throughout the games, from the way the monsters look to the way they move, to the foreboding and stressful atmosphere, to the themes, to the Mind Screw storytelling. Silent Hill 3 even copies exact location names and scenarios from the film in its subway area.
  • Sigil Spam: The Order's official seal, the "Halo of the Sun." It's practically wallpapered all over SH1's Otherworld, and functions as a save icon in SH3.
  • Sinister Geometry: Pyramid Head.
  • Solve the Soup Cans: It's Silent Hill. Even the puzzles hate you. According to "The Book of Lost Memories", many of those are meant to represent various fears. For example, the key you get from the vending machine represents the fear of machines not working the way they're supposed to.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Every game got one. Especially in the opening, when you can hear a somber, mellow tune, or even upbeat song... which can distract you from the fact that the games are fueled with Nightmare Fuel. To quote IGN's review of the DVD:
    "Akira Yamaoka's soundtrack, taken from the videogame series itself, is both warm and terrifying. Think of the sweet smell of grandma's delicious cookies, then imagine a pinch of cyanide awaiting that first bite instead of cinnamon."
  • Spooky Painting: Frame pictures in Silent Hill often depict the impossible — like the exact room you're standing in, complete with slumped corpses.
  • Spectacular Spinning:
    • Industrial-sized fans are a recurring motif. The Lakeside carousel is home to a boss battle each in 1 & 3. A rotating metal ball appears in the background of both the Split Head fight in 1 and the final boss of 4 (complete with deadly gyroscopic discs and a literal bloodbath in the latter). And whether or not Eileen walks into said ball and discs is part of what determines your ending. The other part is whether you get rid of the aforementioned hauntings or leave them be.
    • And then we have this gem courtesy of Dahlia in Silent Hill, made even better by the fact that gyromancy is spinning around in place while in a circle of letters until you fall down, and choosing the letter you fall on. It was probably just another example of her usual gibberish to fake Mad Oracle and The Cloud Cuckoolander Was Right before Harry, though.
      "It was foretold by gyromancy!"
  • Spring-Loaded Corpse: Any corpse not properly given one last kick/stomp can stand back up and continue menacing the player character.
  • Stock Sound Effects:
    • The air-raid siren, some of the monster sounds, the sound of the fan in the first game, the door opening/closing sounds, the demonic moaning sound, and other effects heard in the ambient musics in the series, etc.
    • The sound the sniffer dogs make when they die is the common "cougar roar" sound, the Insane Cancers use a guttural stock sound when awakening, Air Screamers and Pendulums make red-tailed hawk sounds, Hummers make a "bee buzzing" sound, and the Numb Bodies use some of the zombie moaning sounds from the Resident Evil series.
  • Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome:
    • Silent Hill: Poor Harry.
    • Silent Hill 2: According to Frank Sunderland in Silent Hill 4, James never returned from Silent Hill, either, though canon is unclear on whether this means James just didn't ever contact his father or is In Water.
    • Averted with Silent Hill: Origins protagonist Travis — he's shown dropping Alex off at the beginning of Silent Hill: Homecoming. Thanks a lot for nothing, Travis. Or maybe not. In Downpour, Travis' truck can be found while navigating the town, but he's not there.
  • Supernatural Hotspot Town: The titular town was built by demon cultists, perpetually covered in fog, and home to horrific monsters that manifest as the crimes and regrets of those who visit upon it.
  • Survival Horror:
    • Silent Hill: Homecoming pulled a Resident Evil 4 and switched more to an Action Horror gameplay style by significantly increasing the emphasis on the combat and jump-scare startle tactics while decreasing the emphasis on atmosphere and slow-burn horror the series was famous for.
    • Shattered Memories, on the other hand, abandons combat altogether and forces the player to have to run, hide, and barricade entrances to defend oneself against monsters, heavily emphasizing the "survival" aspect.
  • Suspicious Videogame Generosity:
    • Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Origins (as a Shout-Out) both have an absurd number of save points arranged in a pattern as a very unsubtle hint that it might be a good idea to save right now. Depending on your interpretation, it's also symbolic.
    • The town as a whole is also suspiciously "generous" with weapons, ammunition, and healing items, considering that everything else is trying to kill you. Then again, there's no fun in having a plaything die horribly within the first 30 minutes of fun, now is there?
  • Tank Controls: The first three games are a notable example. Dropped when the series stopped its use of Dutch Angle and avant garde camera movement, which fans dividedly disagree upon whether this was for the best or for the worst. While the camera work went a long way to making the games that much more unsettling and the tank controls made the player character slower (increasing the player's fear and stress as it was harder to maneuver around enemies), many critics felt the tank controls hurt the games. Unfortunately you can't have Dutch Angle in a video game without tank controls since trying to control a character with traditional controls while the camera's always changing to strange angles becomes incredibly frustrating, which the original Devil May Cry suffered from, and since most critics were so outspoken against the control style, the development team left it behind in Silent Hill 4: The Room. Shattered Memories has been the only game since then that's made use of tank controls.
  • Tarot Motifs: In the story supplement "Book of Lost Memories", pretty much every aspect of the town and the characters are associated with Tarot cards — Heather is The Fool, The Sun is the games' bonus features, Pyramid Head is Judgement, The Eye of Night (created specifically for the third game, as no Eye of Night appears in the tarot) is The God, and so on.
  • This Is a Drill: You can unlock a rock drill as a weapon in the New Game Plus of the original game, and Judge Holloway wields a nasty looking drill in Homecoming.
  • Through the Eyes of Madness: Silent Hill's primary method of Mind Rape. Several times it is hinted that the "monsters" you're killing may actually be innocent human beings. Alluded to in 3:
    Vincent: Monsters? They looked like monsters to you?
  • Tomato in the Mirror:
    • Silent Hill 2
      • James, you killed your wife.
      • Eddie you did try to kill that man.
      • Angela no, your mom was an asshole, your brother was physically abusive, and your dad molested you. You murdered him and burned down your house.
      • Maria you aren't real. You were made to represent James' dead wife Mary.
    • Heather, you're the reincarnation of Cheryl, who in turn is the reincarnation of Alessa.
    • Travis, you're a sociopath serial killer. But only in the Bad Ending.
    • Alex, you were never in the army, the whole game was just a delusion. But this assumes that Villains Never Lie and that you get the Hospital Ending.
    • Harry, you've actually been dead for about 18 years - you're just a figment of your traumatized daughter's imagination.
    • Murphy, you are the Bogeyman.
  • Too Awesome to Use: Bullets in general, especially for the bigger guns (which have more limited ammo).
  • Tortured Monster: Many of the monsters can be interpreted this way.
  • Uncanny Atmosphere: The beginning of almost every game in the series.
  • Unholy Ground: A textbook example. The land where the town is built was considered a haunted place by the local Native Americans before the settlers came, and after the town was built eerie things occasionally happened. Then a whole lot of evil went on and as a result the dark force inhabiting the land became much more active. Now the town summons anyone with a Dark and Troubled Past and torments them with monsters and visions.
  • Unreliable Narrator: James Sunderland, come on down! From the second game onwards, all of the protagonists are very obviously not honest with themselves. James just gets namechecked because his Player Punch reveal is that memorable.
  • Updated Re-release:
    • The Greatest Hits Playstation 2 version and Xbox version of Silent Hill 2 were released not too long after the original, adding a new playable scenario and several other extras.
    • The Silent Hill HD Collection for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 features ports of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. It has, however, caught a lot of criticism from both fans and the original developers for changing the look, sound, and feel of the games too much and having many stability related bugs.
  • Vague Hit Points: The first three games, which are spiritually related to the Resident Evil games, shares this trope with them. The games don't give you any exact quantification of your health.
    • The pause menu. It shows either a coloured background over Harry's mugshot in Silent Hill, or a coloured filter over the paused gameplay in the latter two, and also follows the RE example of changing character animation based on remaining health.
    • Silent Hill 2 only shows a large cross at the bottom-right corner when at low health. Otherwise health is shown on the inventory screen with a color shade in the top-left corner, and no indication if using a health item could cause excess hit-points to be lost.
  • Variable Mix: Most of the games feature dynamic music which seamlessly changes according to the action, such as the number or proximity of monsters in a room, entering or exiting a room (eg. going back through the clock room in the apartments, jumping down the final hole to the labyrinth), activating a switch (eg. the Alchemilla Hospital generator), or completing some other objective.
  • Video Game Remake:
    • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a remake/reimagining of the first game.
    • Before that, stories of a Silent Hill remake called "Silent Hill: Original Sin" featuring the movie continuity arose, but it turned out to be Silent Hill: Origins.
    • An RPG-style cellphone game remake of the first game did emerge in Japan called Silent Hill: Mobile.
    • A remake of Silent Hill 2 for the PS5 and PC was announced in 2022.
  • Violation of Common Sense: Jump down this possibly bottomless hole? Stick your hand in the toilet? Reach into a dead guy's pocket? Wander around an old insane asylum filled with monsters? Sure, why not! Justified in that the town doesn't give you any other choice by forcing you into these scenarios.
  • Visual Novel: Silent Hill Play Novel, as the title might suggest.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss: The first boss in each of the first three games, all of which have an instant-death attack that will catch inexperienced players off guard.
  • Walls of Text:
    • The reams and reams of information you get from reading stuff picked up in Silent Hill get quite wordy. Even worse, they aren't always quite expository.
    • One LPer made fun of the use of blacked out words in Silent Hill: Origins by pretending to play Mad Libs with the blanks.
    • Mostly averted in Shattered Memories, in that while you do get text messages on the cell phone, few of them (the exception being The Experience in the mall) are overly wordy.
  • Where the Hell Is Springfield?:
    • The games never explicitly spell out where Silent Hill is, other than somewhere in New England. Circumstantial evidence strongly implies it to be in Maine, but this is only hinted at and not fully confirmed in-game. Most resources state it's in Maine / ME so it is not a mystery anymore.
    • For that matter, where the hell are South Ashfield or Shepherd's Glen?
  • Womb Level: The boss battles of the first and third games and Nightmare level of the third game are composed of pulsating flesh. Arguably, the entire fourth game applies as well.
  • Yet Another Stupid Death: Besides the generic death animation, several games feature unusual means of getting horribly murdered.
  • You Wake Up in a Room:
    • Frequently happens when protagonists 'wake up' in the Otherworld. Following an indoor boss fight in Silent Hill 2, James somehow warps to a forbidding-looking outdoor area with insurmountable walls (Labeled "Courtyard" on the real world map).
    • Except in Downpour where Murphy gets the misfortunate to watch reality melt and ooze away then proceeds to get attacked by a sentient blackhole. Fun.
  • Zombie Puke Attack:
    • The "Lying Figures" (the ones that look like they're straitjacketed into their own skin and stumble around like zombies) squirt acid directly from their stomachs. Lore-wise, they are more akin to demons than undead.
    • There are actually several similar monsters - the Lying Figure (Silent Hill 2) sprays a mist of acid; the Armless Figure (from the films) spews a stream of puke; the Straightjacket (Silent Hill: Origins) projectile-vomits; and the Smog (Silent Hill: Homecoming) continuously leaks and belches a noxious black gas. This is unfortunately only one example of every piece of Silent Hill media since the fourth game borrowing and copying things from Silent Hill 2.
"The lock is jammed, this door can't be opened."

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