Silent Hill 4 playlog pt. 7: Dont go Out!!

[indigozeal]

Back when LiveJournal had a heck of a lot more traffic than it does now, I used to read the writings of this one guy who was using his journal as a game & movie blog. He didn't write much about personal stuff, and he had a melange of folks going through his website from the various media communities he frequented. One day, though, he posted about a death in his family. He'd been hit hard, of course, and I felt that it'd be kind of ungrateful to not say something during this tough time, since I'd gotten a good bit of entertainment from his blog. I left a brief message of condolence, but it had the exact opposite effect as intended - he was actually rather creeped out that he was getting this message from a "total stranger." Now, I think he overreacted a bit - he was writing a public blog about public media, not a personal diary - but I can't deny that I'd failed to think of things from his perspective, which was totally different from mine.

What this is all leading up to is that I like the "Dont go Out!!" on Henry's door and think it's one of the great horror messages, right up there with Resident Evil's "Itchy. Tasty." diary and Mary's letter to James. I like that the idiosyncratic punctuation & capitalization and the way the message is scrawled on there with crayon or something make it uncertain as to whether "Walter" is meant to be the author or the addressee. I like it more, though, for what it demonstrates Walter presumes - that Henry not only knows who "Walter" is but will readily follow instructions from him. In other words, Walter has developed a certain regard for Henry and built up some sort of relationship in his head from years of voyeurism (and this is the other big reveal of the Joseph section: that Walter's body has been interred in a hidden room of Henry's apartment, and that he has been with Henry, watching him, during his entire tenancy of 302), and he supposes, incorrectly, that the relationship is reciprocal.

This makes the antagonist's view of the protagonist interesting & creepy. The bit about Walter's body and how it got in the apartment doesn't make much sense (in fact, there's a good deal in SH4 that really isn't explained adequately; that's for an upcoming segment), but it leads to the best kind of scare: one with implications that aren't underlined but are clear enough that they're allowed to dawn on the player herself, and which linger for how disturbing they are. The idea that this horrible corpse has been with Henry, right next to where he sleeps, and that he's never actually been alone in his apartment, ever - that he's had another presence watching him this whole time - is actually quite disturbing, particularly in light of the protagonist's extreme introversion and the room's function gameplaywise (at least in the first half) of being a safe, quiet haven from the craziness in the Otherworlds outside, a place where you can be alone and monster-free.

It also gives some dimension to Walter that's at once human and unsettling. It emphasizes Walter's desire for some sort of kindness & understanding from the world, the drive that's ultimately behind his whole murderous plan, and explains Walter's weird solicitude toward Henry at times: talking to him about his fond memories of Eileen; giving him the doll that's his most treasured possession (even if accepting the gift ultimately leads to another haunting). It's also what I initially thought Henry being labeled as the "Receiver of Wisdom" in Walter's little victim pantheon meant: Henry being led world by world through Walter's formative experiences and personal history, being cultivated into the one person who would understand Walter. (Well, one of two people; with all the possessions, Walter seems to be going with a more direct route of getting Mother Reborn Eileen to understand him. Joseph's presence as the "Giver of Wisdom" shakes my Henry theory up a bit, but the apparent primary intended meaning of the Receiver of Wisdom role leads, again, to more questions.) And yet the voyeurism - the lack of understanding of boundaries, and the assumption of relationships where none exist - causes Walter to pose an additional threat, a violation not only of the flesh in wanting to kill Henry, but one of the mind: one that's been longstanding, that's been ongoing without the protagonist's knowledge. It serves to underscore how wrong Walter is, how alienated he is from the workings of a normal human mind. Walter has a weird fondness for Henry & Eileen; he wants to kill them; and how these two ideas can sit side-by-side in his mind, with no contradiction whatsoever to Walter, makes him a more effective villain.

(I stumbled across it in the aftermath of the whole hey-my-birthday-is-a-holiday-in-a-slash-fandom discovery, so there are clear overtones at work in it, but I have to say that this short story is actually the best material I've seen, including the actual game, in milking the "disturbing" quality out of this scenario.)

It also underlines, though, how weakly Walter is written in the second half of the game, when he's turned into a simple axe-wielding maniac. Walter has to be a constant threat in the second part of the game - but, as examined above, Walter doesn't have to lose the other half of his personality to be threatening (and he in fact is more threatening if it is present). As it stands, though, he just becomes a flat slasher villain halfway through the game, and when you are asked to emphasize with him in a certain part of the last level, I had a hard time doing so, because the human elements of his story had been so long absent. A miscalculation in timing by the creators may have been at fault here: you spend a longer time in the second half, away from the first-half characterization, than perhaps the programmers realize, because the second-half difficulty is ridiculous. The solution, I think, was to have Walter talk more: give him a couple scenes in the second half where he's directly addressing Henry & Eileen.

One thing I do have to say is that Silent Hill 4 excels at moments of horrific realization. That when Walter was nice to you on the stairs, it wasn't because he didn't want to kill Henry - it was because he didn't want to kill Henry yet. That the ghosts we've been seeing are Walter's past victims, and the people we tried but failed to save will now be attacking us. That Walter's been in the apartment all along. That Henry has been stuck in Otherworld 302 all this time, and Cynthia really was right when she said that "this is just a dream" - because Walter's victims were taken to the Otherworld in their sleep. (You can see this foreshadowed during Building World the first time - if you look across the way to Richard Braintree's apartment, you can see his body asleep in his bed during his stay in the Otherworld - as well in Henry's puzzled comments about his lack of appetite and his stomach being "paralyzed": he's not in his physical body, so he has no corpus to sustain.) Then there are the optional story-linked shocks like Walter staring at Henry through the peephole, signaling the end of Henry's bystander role and the apartment as a safe space, and of victim Henry appearing at the peephole, confirming his ultimate fate should he fail.

That's it for now. I'll look at the final level, take a couple side trips, and wrap up with a look at the game as a whole.
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