“I’m there now, in our special place, waiting for you.” That was the email I received from Jeremy Blaustein, letting me know that he was in the video chat lobby for our interview. You may know Blaustein from his localization and voice direction work on now-legendary games like Metal Gear Solid. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and, of course, Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill 3 and Silent Hill 4: The Room. Nowadays, Blaustein is the CEO and founder of Dragonbaby, a full-service game localization company based in Osaka, Japan.
The surreal and sophisticated story of Silent Hill 2 set a high benchmark for interactive horror. It’s a gripping tale of a haunted man, James Sunderland, drawn to a fog-filled town determined to reflect his Jungian Shadow back upon him. Augmented by disturbing creature designs and a chilling soundtrack, it was instrumental in the development of modern video game stories, and few know the script quite like Blaustein.

I could talk at length about my love for Silent Hill 2’s singular ambience, which is undoubtedly negotiated by the dialogue and delivery. Confronting works like Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder are often mentioned as a critical influence on the game, but you can also feel the spectre of David Lynch (notably 1997’s Lost Highway) looming over Silent Hill 2 in a manner rarely seen in modern AAA. “I’m tremendously into David Lynch,” Blaustein said. “And that was true for the (Silent Hill 2) team, too, so we connected right away on all of that stuff. I mean, look at Metal Gear Solid — I straight-up stole David Lynch lines.” You can see the Lynchian influence manifest best in an early closet-peeking scene from Silent Hill 2, which evokes a similar encounter in Blue Velvet.
In my restless dreams, I see that town
Across James Sunderland’s devastating psychic odyssey, the writing Blaustein is most proud of is Mary’s Letter, an unforgettable, gut-wrenching monologue that arrives at the very crux of the game. “I spent a lot of time reading over in my head how that would be performed to make it sound like a good script that the actors could perform well,” Blaustein said. “And when Monica (Taylor Horgan) read that letter, you know, she read it so fucking well, that was the most proud I was of my script,” he continued. “Because when you write something that an actor can perform well, you know you’ve done a good job writing it.” In Blaustein’s eyes, writing something that an actor can deliver naturally parallels the capacity for an audience to understand and connect with the work. “There wasn’t any gap at all; it was exactly the way I wanted it,” he added.

It’s considered an unabashed classic now, but it might shock you to learn that the initial reviews for the sequel to Silent Hill weren’t so favourable in 2001. “The reviewers were talking about how it’s not really Silent Hill and, as I understand it, it’s with that timing that the company (Konami) had to figure out what games they’re going to make for next year,” Blaustein said. “And so it was decided that they would continue the series, but they split the team into two groups to work simultaneously.” As a result of this decision, Silent Hill 3 landed in 2003, with Silent Hill 4: The Room arriving in 2004, just a year later.
“I think it was very rushed, you know, making two Silent Hill games at the same time, having split the team,” Blaustein said. “These guys who, up until this point, have been completely collaborative, throwing ideas at each other and coming up with the best ones — now they’re just trying to slap together some stuff. Silent Hill 3 was still very much, you know, in Japan, with a great deal of collaboration between us all,” he added. “I think Donna Burke did a really great job with Claudia (Wolf). Right away, I was like, just do Galadriel, man…”
Don’t go out!! Walter
Then came Silent Hill 4: The Room, the weird cousin of the Team Silent games and my personal favourite. You play Henry Townsend, the tenant of an inescapable apartment who gets caught in the web of a supernatural serial killer. Players explore Room 302 from a first-person perspective, peering through its peepholes and watching on as society continues without them. Meanwhile, randomised hauntings appear on the apartment’s fleshy walls and invade its domestic electronics. It’s hard not to draw comparisons between The Room and P.T., Hideo Kojima’s cancelled Silent Hill project. Alas, this is only half the game – Townsend must intermittently crawl through a hole in the bathroom wall to various dreamlike otherworlds, presented in a third-person perspective and dominated by blood-curdling monsters and suspect melancholy characters.
“(Suguru Murakoshi, Director of Silent Hill 4) had come up with this idea,” Blaustein said. “First, we’ll make the outside scary so (the player) depends upon coming back to the room, and then we take it away from them. It was a well-thought-out idea. But the cutscenes themselves didn’t seem to tell a narrative very well; it just didn’t hang together,” he continued. “And Murakoshi being a quiet guy — I think he was a painter — well shit, (Hiroyuki Owaku, Scenario Writer, Silent Hill 2) was a quiet guy, but when he talked about his script, we talked about it together.”

Blaustein noted that there was much less communication during the development of Silent Hill 4, at least compared to previous entries. “When I was translating it, I had little pieces, but I never really quite got how they fit together,” Blaustein continued. One little piece Blaustein picked up on is that Murakoshi wanted to use Jennifer Lopez’s character in The Cell as a reference for Cynthia Velasquez. In the movie, Catherine Deane enters the dreamscape of a comatose serial killer to locate a kidnapped victim. In Silent Hill 4, Velasquez is a character Henry meets in The Subway World who believes they are trapped in a dream.
Joe Romersa, a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who worked on Silent Hill 4: The Room, said that the development team were “tight-lipped” regarding supporting visuals due to leaks in the games industry at the time. Instead, he was given scripts and rough translations concerning what the songs should be about, with crucial phrases and feelings highlighted. “I had no visuals or video to watch; I just had to close my eyes and imagine the nightmare presented to me,” Romersa said.
Don’t worry… it’s just a dream, remember?
One of the songs Romersa worked on was Room of Angel, which plays during a tragic scene involving Cynthia Valesquez but has lyrics that allude to Walter Sullivan’s relationship with his mother and Room 302. Romersa notes that the lyrics were inspired by “the dichotomy of a lullaby sung from hatred instead of love.” Outtake lyrics from the translation that were given to Romersa were improvised by series vocalist Mary Elizabeth McGlynn during the recording. “She managed to make the poem work over the piano solo section,” Romersa added.

Silent Hill 4 certainly took some big and obscure swings compared to its predecessors, and a lot of its strangeness was maintained while Blaustein was localizing the script, often without him knowing how it would manifest in-game. “I remember directing that on-fire scene (Jasper Gein’s death), and the actor just yelling and yelling and yelling, but I had no idea what it would look like, and neither did he”, Blaustein said.
Elsewhere, a key item in Silent Hill 4 is the umbilical cord of its main antagonist, Walter Sullivan. It’s kept in a box by the apartment building’s superintendent, Frank Sunderland — James Sunderland’s father. Blaustein told me that preserving the umbilical cord in a special box after childbirth is a sentimental tradition in Japan, but it’s mostly unheard of in the West. “When we had (that scene) recorded, I remember coming to the conclusion that we’ll keep it strange because it works on a different level,” he added. Blaustein also slipped a few homages in while naming characters in Silent Hill 4. Richard Braintree, for the Massachusetts town, and Henry Townsend after Pete Townsend, frontman of The Who — and because of the double entendre of ‘Town’s End’.
There was a game here, it’s gone now
With Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 Remake just around the corner and exciting prospects like Silent Hill Townfall in the pipeline, it feels like we’re about to enter a renaissance period for Konami’s psychological horror series, but this trip down memory lane has got me all misty-eyed. I’m concerned that we may be leaving all this rich past behind in the process. Particularly, I find it concerning that playing the first four Silent Hill games on a modern system is still so challenging. I was too young to play the Team Silent games when they landed, but subsequently discovered them in adulthood, so I’m late to the party myself. Still, these potent, foundational experiences deserve to be played and talked about by even younger generations.
And, to be fair, it’s the original quartet of games that is responsible for the activated interest in this modern Silent Hill revival. Yet, you can’t just boot up Silent Hill 2 or Silent Hill 3 on Steam and dig into the source material. Unless you own a PlayStation 2 and the original software, playing Silent Hill 2 legally on a PC requires community-built patches and tinkering before you can even get started, and the same can be said for Silent Hill 3. Silent Hill 4: The Room is the only entry readily available on a digital storefront, and barely anyone knows about it.
I don’t love the idea that Bloober Team’s reimagining (listed and sold as Silent Hill 2, not Silent Hill 2 Remake) may become the entry point, if not the only way for newcomers to play Silent Hill 2, regardless of how good or bad the remake may be. I can only hope that, like the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection, we’ll see a Silent Hill Master Collection from Konami in the future, one that compiles these inimitable games that are starting to become lost to time. It’s the right thing to do as a nod to the original developers for this formidable run — one that left a soured flesh-coloured mark on gaming history.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting Postmode on Patreon or tipping us via Kofi!