The Silent Hill Phenomenon

In-game text.

The Silent Hill Phenomenon is a document found in Silent Hill: The Short Message. It is located in one of the corridors of the Villa building. It describes a phenomenon in which people around the world experience the boundary between their subconscious thoughts and reality obscured, causing the manifestation of delusions. It is named for its similarity to occurrences in Silent Hill, Maine.

Transcript

The Silent Hill Phenomenon

The suicide rate has increased around the world, in large part
due to the struggles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, with
countries still unsure how best to handle the issue.

These trying times have also given rise to a strange
phenomenon in many areas: those affected suddenly claim to
see fog even on fair-weather days-and lose consciousness
shortly after.

This has come to be known as the "Silent Hill Phenomenon,"
named after a similar event that occurred in an eponymous U.S.
town.

The first to propose a theory explaining why this could be
happening is Dr. XXX, a social psychologist at XXX University,
who had the following to say on the matter.

"To one who is psychologically unstable, fog represents
uncertainty and sensory illusions. When in a state of high stress,
one's vision may become obscured or tunneled, as if one is
wandering through a dense fog or mist."

"Societal uncertainty or apprehension about the future
manifests as fog, thus blurring the lines between illusion and reality."

As time goes on, we are seeing more and more cases of
the Silent Hill Phenomenon.

In response, Dr. XXX calls for a rapid rebuilding of society, as
well as a stronger emphasis on counseling and mental health
care for the young.

Behind the scenes

The Silent Hill game series was dormant following the release of Silent Hills: Playable Teaser in 2014. Due to the time gap between installments and similar indie horror games saturating the market, series producer Motoi Okamoto wanted to relaunch Silent Hill by rebranding its identity as "true psychological horror". Starting with the interactive television series Silent Hill: Ascension in 2023, it was stipulated by Konami that new installments take place around the world, in an effort to make the franchise more synonymous with the genre itself than the titular town. As showrunner Jacob Navok explained, "Growing the franchise means that you can't set everything in Silent Hill, in the same way that Biohazard broke past Raccoon City."

Cut content specified that the "Silent Hill Phenomenon" occurs when Silent Hill's Otherworld becomes tethered to locations that are susceptible to the supernatural.

Silent Hill: The Short Message was released in 2024, taking place in a German villa. A deleted plotline from the game elaborated on the "Silent Hill Phenomenon." The Order, a religious cult from the previous games, survived extinction by using the internet and political radicalization to expand their membership worldwide. They were performing rituals to tap into Silent Hill's Otherworld in locations that are susceptible to supernatural occurrences. Once successful, they sacrifice people to that location to "purify" them, which perpetuates the Otherworld by contributing to the brain fog. Several of the students and faculty at Anita Planert's school joined the cult and were selecting sacrifices from the student body based on racial or economic characteristics. The villa was vulnerable to the "Silent Hill Phenomenon" because of its history with witchcraft.

Continuity

• In Lost Memories: Silent Hill Chronicle, Hiroyuki Owaku states that the Otherworld phenomenon is intrinsic to the town of Silent Hill and can only manifest outside of it through a "unique power". It identifies Claudia Wolf as possessing the power that allowed it to manifest in another town in Silent Hill 3.
• In Silent Hill 4: The Room, serial killer Walter Sullivan performs an occult ritual to create other worlds from his memories and subconscious thoughts, causing supernatural phenomena to occur in Ashfield, Maine.
• In deleted material from The Short Message, the Order's practice of sacrificing people to the "Silent Hill Phenomenon" was tied to a parable about a child kept safe inside a stone castle that had been purified of monsters. Although absent from the game, the parable was recounted by Rachel Hernandez to her daughter in Ascension.

References

v · e · d Silent Hill: The Short Message
Characters
Major Characters
Anita Planert - Maya Hindenburg
Other Characters
Amelie - Krysta Planert
Monsters
Sakura Head
Locations
The Villa - Kettenstadt
Terms
Flashlight - Radio - Real World - Fog World - The Silent Hill Phenomenon - The Witch of the Far East - Otherworld - Monster - Robbie the Rabbit
Archives
Memos - Puzzles - Soundtrack