Silent Hill is a 2006 supernatural horror film directed by Christophe Gans and written by Roger Avary, based on the video game series of the same name published by Konami.

[6] The first installment in the Silent Hill film series, it stars Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Deborah Kara Unger, Kim Coates, Tanya Allen, Alice Krige and Jodelle Ferland.

After attempting to gain the film rights to Silent Hill for five years, Gans sent a video interview to Konami explaining his plans for adapting it and how important the games were to him.

Principal photography began in April 2005 and lasted three months with an estimated $50 million budget, and was shot on sound stages and on location in Ontario, Canada.

Rose Da Silva and her husband Christopher are disturbed by their adopted daughter Sharon's constant sleepwalking and nightmares about Silent Hill, a town in West Virginia that was abandoned in the 1970s due to a massive coal seam fire.

Cybil encounters and tries to arrest Rose, but while attempting to bring her to the local station, they realize they are trapped, all roads out of town ending in a mysterious cliff.

Rose encounters many other inhuman creatures and learns of Alessa Gillespie, a young girl burned as a witch by the Brethren, the town's fanatical Manichean cult.

Hospitalized and in excruciating pain, Alessa's rage split her soul apart, one half manifesting as the dark entity responsible for the shifting dimensions of Silent Hill.

Alessa emerges from the blood flowing from the wound as a disfigured being bound to a hospital bed, and tears Christabella and her followers apart with razor wire.

Gans tried to stick as close to the original source as possible, while Avary saw it as his main task to convey the spirit of the game; he kept some storylines, and tried to combine the rest of the elements into new compositions.

[18] Since Gans had already formed the concept of the future plot of the film, he sent the screenwriter several discs with "atmospheric" videos[A 2] to point Avary's work in the right direction, as well as the developments compiled by himself and Nicolas Boukhrief.

In addition to Rose, the key characters are the childless Cybil, Dahlia, and Christabella; the latter of whom lost her child, believing that abandoning motherhood is a blessing for society.

By the time Silent Hill comes to its denouement, which takes place in the sanctuary of the sect, the film turns into a cautionary tale warning against religious fanaticism.

In speaking about the creatures in Silent Hill, Gans said that "these monsters are [damned], with the poetic direction of the term: they are a little like the Japanese phantoms, i.e. residues of forgotten feelings as strong as hatred or [guilt].

[19][35] In the film, Gans paid homage to the works of Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer, Francis Bacon, Jean Cocteau, Alberto Giacometti, Clive Barker, H. P. Lovecraft, David Cronenberg, and Michael Mann.

[41] The executive producer of the film, Andrew Mason, noted that Mitchell had the freshness, energy and joy of life necessary for the main character, who will lead the audience through a terrible world.

After Jodelle made her audition statement "I've always wanted to play the devil", and the director watched 15 hours of footage featuring the actress, she was approved for the role.

[27] Ferland, who had 26 acting credits at the time, reported that she has already played several girls similar to her character from the film: "I usually get creepy roles, like Dark Alessa".

[12] In the game, Dahlia is portrayed as a mysterious occult fanatic who attempts to summon God by burning her own daughter,[47] while in the film, those qualities are transferred to another character named Christabella.

Unger described her character as a crazy, slightly enigmatic prophet[41] who gains wisdom through suffering, and compared her to Cassandra[8] and John Proctor from the play The Crucible.

This decision was supported by three reasons: the entire story takes place in a fictional world, the plot revolves around a woman trying to save her daughter, and the film hardly uses firearms.

[21][verification needed] In an interview, the director stated that the only scene that didn't make it into the final version of the film was a brief conversation sequence involving Christabella in a church with two strangers.

However, he also noted the presence of another "unfinished" fragment—the meeting of Anna originally featured her being attacked by an Armless Man near the hotel, during which she is saved by Cybil and Rose and the wounded creature crawls under a car to disappear into a manhole.

The film was also released on UMD for Sony's PlayStation Portable on August 22, 2006; there are no special features but the disc includes a 1.78 widescreen format, Dolby Digital 2.0, and subtitles.

Silent Hill has landed in the top 10 highest-grossing film adaptations of video game properties listed on Box Office Mojo (from 1980 to present) at No.

The site's critical consensus reads, "Silent Hill is visually impressive, but as with many video game adaptations, it's plagued by inane dialogue, a muddled plot, and an overlong runtime.

[77] James Berardinelli of ReelViews awarded the film two and a half stars out of four, opining that it "is overlong, with too many unnecessary scenes" and that "a lot of the movie seems like pointless running around", but added that it "looks great" and "packs in a few scary moments and offers a nicely ambiguous conclusion".

[78] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave one and a half stars out of four, calling it "an incredibly good-looking film", but noting that he "did not understand the story" and criticizing how "all through the movie, characters are pausing in order to offer arcane back-stories and historical perspectives and metaphysical insights and occult orientations".

[80] Dennis Harvey of Variety opined that "above-average interest is generated for a time by [the] elaborate visual package", but "in the end, Silent Hill degenerates into an overblown replay of all those Twilight Zone and Stephen King stories in which outsiders stumble upon a time-warped location from which there's no escape".

[2] According to Nathan Lee of The New York Times, "It begins as a quest, develops into a ghost-town mystery, devolves into a preposterous cautionary tale about witchcraft and religious fundamentalism, and wraps up like the outrageously overwrought fantasy of a movie nerd obsessed with horror who has been given obscene amounts of money to adapt a video game.