Silent Hill as an alternative highlights an actual life downside confronted by West Virginia and lots of different components of Appalachia with out counting on stereotypical representations of Appalachian individuals. The place stereotypes have depicted uncivilized godless violence (Deliverance is a first-rate instance), the native residents of Silent Hill are center class fundamentalists, every of them devoted members of a cult known as the Brethren.
This subversive depiction is additional expounded on in flashbacks to earlier than the catastrophe that made the city uninhabitable and created the alternate hellish actuality. The residents of Silent Hill are economically comfy, with lofty beliefs of social compliance and snuffing out perceived irregular habits in merciless methods extra in step with a critique of suburbia than Appalachia. This illustration is a significant departure from the standard reliance on the imagery of scattered, violent hillbillies that has dominated depictions of Appalachian antagonists throughout mediums.
Though there’s nonetheless an outline of a violent populace, it’s a violence not rooted within the degradation of Appalachians as ignorant and uncultured however fairly a extra translatable depiction of conformity that would occur wherever. The usage of West Virginia because the setting highlights the actual up to date problems with environmental destruction attributable to the extractive industries which have plagued the area for hundreds of years.
The catastrophe that in the end brought about the supernatural creation of the Silent Hill dimension deepens the thematic strata of Silent Hill. Alessa (additionally performed by Jodelle Ferland), a younger woman from the times earlier than the dimension opened, was ridiculed and villainized by the pious residents of Silent Hill for being born out of wedlock. Dahlia (Deborah Kara Unger), Alessa’s mom, permits Christabella (Alice Krige), the excessive priestess of the Brethren, to attempt a “purifying” ritual on Alessa after she is raped by her faculty’s janitor. Christabella and her followers then try and burn Alessa alive in an immolation ritual which is stopped by Dahlia and police officer Thomas Gucci (Kim Coates), however solely after Alessa is horribly disfigured by the fireplace (this hearth is in the end what causes the coal-seam catastrophe that compelled residents to desert the city).
Torn aside by her hatred, Alessa creates the constantly-shifting nightmarish darkish Silent Hill dimension, trapping a guilt-ridden Dahlia and members of the Brethren in her ashen, monster-laden hellscape. Alessa is thus break up between Darkish Alessa, a demonic entity feeding off her hatred, and Sharon, her innocence incarnate.
It isn’t a stretch to explain Silent Hill as an ecofeminist piece of media. Ecofeminism is outlined as “each political activism and mental critique” by ScienceDirect. It’s a framework that argues the hurt accomplished to girls and the hurt accomplished to the atmosphere mirror one another and manifest in a variety of parallel methods societally and politically.
