While both of the current cinematic adaptations of the long acclaimed Silent Hill videogame horror franchise have left much to be desired, the second far more than the first, there may well be a glimmer of hope for the latest iteration that's currently in the works. Per a report from Deadline, Return to Silent Hill, set as the new live-action adaptation of the Silent Hill 2 game, has officially announced its first two cast members. Jeremy Irvine has taken the lead role of James Sunderland, and Hannah Emily Anderson will play James' deceased wife Mary Sunderland.
Return to Silent Hill is being directed by Christophe Gans, who also helmed the first film called Silent Hill back in 2006, which was a live-action remake of the first game in the franchise. He's also co-writing the script alongside William Josef Schneider and Keiichiro Toyama, who co-created the Silent Hill game series itself. Victor Hadida is serving as executive producer. Jeremy Irvine, who is best known for his role in Steven Spielberg's War Horse (2011), is starring as the game's lead protagonist James Sunderland, while Hannah Emily Anderson is set to play James' wife Mary Sunderland.
The Story of Silent Hill 2 and How That Could Translate to the Big Screen
The premise of the movie will revolve around the plot of the second game Silent Hill 2, where James is mysteriously summoned to the lakeside resort town of Silent Hill via a letter from his wife Mary, who has since been dead for three years. Determined to find out if she's somehow alive, he travels into the town to find her. However, the town he once knew and enjoyed going to with his wife has been transformed by a supernatural evil that follows him the further in he goes. Terrifying monsters wander the streets and abandoned buildings, and the closer James gets to finding the truth, the more distorted his surroundings become. The story is a deeply haunting and emotional tale about lost love as well as atonement for one's wrongdoings. The complexity and layers of the storyline and its characters that intertwine with the town's history, combined with an incredibly immersive and terrifying experience have earned the game multiple accolades, and it's long been considered one of the greatest horror games of all time.
It begs the question if director Gans will truly be up to the task of adapting a game of such magnitude to the big screen. While he did reasonably well with his first live-action adaptation Silent Hill (2006), which was intended to bring the first game of the series to life, many fans disagreed with the changes made to the original story its characters. Some of those included changing the main protagonist from a man named Harry Mason to a woman named Rose Da Silva, and the questionable inclusion of both the infamous monster Pyramid Head and the hospital nurse monsters who both don't appear until the second game in the series for very specific reasons. It all likely was meant to make the movie more marketable, but it still distorted the original story. While evidently James and Mary Sunderland will stay very much the same, thankfully, we've yet to see if the other key characters from the game will remain loyal to the source content or be changed in some way.
Return to Silent Hill is currently in production and has no release date as of yet.