'Silent Hill' cast, director discuss love story, monsters

Director Christophe Gans and actors Hannah Emily Anderson and Evie Templeton said their horror sequel Return to Silent Hill, in theaters Friday, is romantic. The third movie adaptation of the video game series is based on the 2001 Silent Hill 2 game.

Gans, who directed 2006's Silent Hill but not 2012's Silent Hill: Revelation, said he always wanted to adapt the second game. However he said he did agree with producers that the first movie should establish the world of Silent Hill.

In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Gans said the appeal of Silent Hill 2 was the love story. Jeremy Irvine plays James Sunderland, who returns to the town of Silent Hill because his long lost wife, Mary (Anderson), wrote him a letter.

"I think that the love story at the core of Silent Hill 2 is very much like in the old Edgar Allan Poe tales," Gans said. "The guy looking for his wife finally decides to accept his own madness."

At the beginning of the film, James meets Mary at a bus stop, where a mishap with her suitcase causes her to miss her bus. Anderson said that begins the film with a meet-cute before James discovers the horrors awaiting in Silent Hill.

"It's really like Romeo and Juliet," Anderson said. "It's a funny way to start a horror film. It's really unusual."

Gans' reference for the bus stop scene was Douglas Sirk's '50s romances. He also used the bus stop that begins the Silent Hill 2 game.

"We see the same bus stop and it's sunny and bright and they are looking like two nice lovebirds," Gans said. "Suddenly, bam, we are in Silent Hill."

While Gans was immersed in the games, Anderson was not. She watched gameplay videos in preparation but focused on the screenplay by Gans, Sandra Vo-Anh and William Schneider.

"I'm terrible at video games," Anderson admitted. "I play Mario Kart once in a while with the bumpers on."

While looking for Mary, James encounters several other women left behind in the desolate town of Silent Hill. Anderson plays many of them in different hair and costumes.

"I really got to stretch my wings in this one," Anderson said. "It really felt like a graduation, like I was just able to take all my experience and my past horror films and graduate to this crazy project."

Anderson plays a coroner in Jigsaw, the eighth film in the Saw franchise, and appeared in Season 1 of the TV series of The Purge.

"I love horror films," Anderson said. "I think the older I get, the more I appreciate them, especially having a behind-the-scenes take on what it takes to make one. It's really fun to play in a really high-stakes environment, and there's often a lot of humor on a horror set out of necessity to preserve our mental health."

Working with costume designer Momirka Bailovic on her costumes also reminded Anderson of a romantic comedy.

"It's sort of like that montage in a movie when the character's trying on all the clothes and going shopping," Anderson said.

Anderson's most horrific alter ego is Moth Mary, a dark entity who spits moths out of her mouth. It fulfilled Anderson's desire to play an actual monster.

"I was always like, 'Make me a zombie, give me prosthetics,'" She said. "It took, like, 5 or 6 hours to put on, and an hour to take off, but I loved it, I would do it again in a heartbeat."

Evie, 17, reprises her role of Laura from the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2. James encounters young Laura on the streets of Silent Hill, giving him cryptic information.

Laura is not one of the monsters in Silent Hill, but she has a "playful, mischievous" agenda, Evie said.

"At the essence, she's just a frightened girl, and she's looking for someone to love her," Evie said. "I think she has this almost fear and expectation that she'll be abandoned, so I think that that was kind of what I was trying to carry through this."

Both James and some of Anderson's characters encounter other monsters in Silent Hill. Gans brought movement coach Roberto Campanella back from the first movie to choreograph dancers, contortionists and acrobats to perform frightening motions.

"The producers were hoping that we push the monster in post-production and do them entirely with CGI," Gans said. "We have to have the monster on the set, in front of the actors, played by dancers."

Gans said that if Silent Hill is all a hallucination in James' mind, it would still look real to James. So the creatures had to be real in the scenes.

"People believe in what they see," Gans said.

Anderson appreciated Gans' choice to hire dancers as the monsters.

"I think a dancer has just a language that an actor doesn't have naturally in their body," she said.

Campanella relinquished the role he played in the previous two films, Red Pyramid, to Robert Strange.

"Because he's older, he didn't take the part of Pyramid," Gans said. "He was just doing the choreography."