This horror thriller shocked the games industry with its tense world of terror – and its monstrous vision is as fearsome as ever

A father and daughter are driving through a remote area of America when a ghostly figure steps into the road, forcing the car to swerve wildly. As the man regains consciousness, he realises the car is a wreck and his daughter is missing. Shocked and confused, he staggers into the nearby town of Silent Hill, where his nightmare truly begins.

Loaded with dread, this scene could be the opening of a nasty horror movie. In fact, it’s the setup to the classic video game Silent Hill, launched on this day 20 years ago by the Japanese gaming company Konami. Alongside Capcom’s Resident Evil, the title helped popularise the survival horror genre of action thrillers, which are characterised by tense exploration, expressionistic camera angles, fiendish environmental puzzles and limited access to weaponry, making every encounter with a monster a mortal challenge.

But the differences between Silent Hill and Resident Evil are profound. The latter presents a conventional heroic narrative, with the player-characters unambiguously coded as righteous saviours who must eradicate the evil represented by the zombies to restore symbolic order. In Silent Hill, originally billed as psychological horror, the roles are muddier. Lead character Harry Mason is a normal guy, frightened and disoriented by the accident: he gets breathless after running short distances, and the weapon-aiming mechanic is awkward and inaccurate, to symbolise his inexperience. This is a game that deliberately disempowers its protagonist and, through him, the player.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Silent Hill constantly subverts expectations and sexualised stereotypes – so of course the nurses want to kill you. Photograph: Konami

Silent Hill is inspired by much more avant garde source material than Resident Evil. While the latter is beholden to horror maestros such as George A Romero and Lucio Fulci, Konami’s Team Silent development studio, including first-time director Keiichirō Toyama, was influenced by David Lynch and Dario Argento. Silent Hill is like Twin Peaks, a town of sullen diners, abandoned amusement parks and sinister gothic lodges. As in Argento’s movies, the game’s world is filled with occultist icons and powerful demons waiting to be summoned. Meanwhile, artist Takayoshi Sato drew from the work of Francis Bacon, whose bizarre and disturbing portraits of people in states of metamorphosis clearly inspired the game’s menagerie of amorphous monsters.

Silent Hill is about internal conflict and psychological breakdown. As Harry explores the abandoned town, looking for clues, meeting its weird, damaged inhabitants (another Lynchian device), we’re encouraged to doubt the veracity of what he is experiencing. Blackouts and nightmare sequences suggest Harry is hallucinating, other characters continually question reality and the plot wildly contradicts itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eerie and dislocating … the original Silent Hill. Photograph: Konami

In the apocalyptic world of Silent Hill, school corridors are coated in blood, hospital wards are filled with rusted beds, the sheets disgustingly stained. But is this environmental degradation real, or is it symbolic of Harry’s mental deterioration? Outside, in the streets there is an omnipresent fog obscuring everything more than a few feet away. This was a common technical feature of PlayStation games of the time, reducing the amount of rendering the rudimentary graphics hardware had to deal with, but it was never employed to such eerie and dislocating effect as it was here. The opening sequence, in which Harry chases a vision of his daughter through the streets – her presence often little more than a ghostly white figure in the mist – is a masterful example of using technical limitations for atmospheric effect.

Its fear of burgeoning adulthood also underpins Carrie and other horror flicks loaded with dread about female bodies

Sound, too, is deftly employed to induce terror. Audio director Akira Yamaoka used and manipulated sounds from everyday life – construction site equipment, idling engines, dripping taps, bells and clocks – to create a sense of twisted familiarity. In the game, Harry famously discovers a portable radio that emits static whenever a monster is near. It’s incredibly effective because the sound is loaded with horror fiction connotations: like the static from the TV screen in Poltergeist that alerts us to the ghosts; or the static in apocalyptic movies that tells us no one is transmitting, and society has collapsed.

What Harry uncovers in this broken town is a centuries-old cult, determined to resurrect an ancient demon of immense evil and power. There are four endings to uncover (five if you include the comedy alternative), each with its own slant on the game’s true meaning. But the game is so rich in Freudian symbolism – from slitheringly phallic monsters to the witch-like lead antagonist Dahlia Gillespie, who has obvious connotations of the archaic mother – that a purely psychosexual reading is very possible (an element carried through to each subsequent Silent Hill title).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Silent Hill fan at New York Comic Con in 2015. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Silent Hill might be a horror game about a small town that gets swallowed up by a cultist evil. Or it might be about mental health and anxiety. Or, in the way the narrative begins to confuse and combine Harry’s young child, Cheryl, with a teenaged character named Alessa, it might also be about a parent who fears losing their beloved daughter to adolescence. This fear of burgeoning adulthood and sexuality also underpins Carrie, The Exorcist and countless other horror flicks loaded with dread about female bodies.

This is the lasting brilliance of Silent Hill and the fascinating series it birthed. The game’s development team set out to make a horror game that offered more than jump scares – something shocking, unusual and transgressive. They learned that blurring ambiguity and familiarity, psychology and sexuality, naturalism and symbolism was a way to achieve this on a modest budget and with limited technical means. Every tense, dark, weird horror game that followed – from Dead Space and FEAR to Soma – owes a debt to the craft of Silent Hill. It told the player that true horror is rarely out there in the fog, in the abandoned hospital, or even in the overgrown cemetery. It has been inside us the entire time.