Silent Hill 3 Analysis: Frightfully Feminine Fears (Part 1)

Silent Hill 3 is a game I still have yet to play through to the end. I usually chicken out by the subway level because the game is so hauntingly, oppressively horrifying. I've been trying to figure out why this game affects me in this way so much. I finally drummed up the courage to finish Silent Hill 2 a couple of years ago and its tension-fraught atmosphere had me reaching for some music to play to get me through the hospital and prison level.

Silent Hill 3 is...different, though. No music or podcast playing alongside this game makes it any less tense. You are always on edge as Heather Mason, walking through these liminal spaces and grotesque otherworld environments. I've finally figured out why it is so scary to me, with the help of a couple of YouTubers.

Silent Hill 3: Explaining Womanhood Through Horror by tangomushi is an incredible analysis on how the game centers on purely feminine fears, examining how they experienced the world through Heather's eyes. Eurothug4000's video, The Real Horrors of Silent Hill 3, is also a fantastic overview of the female-centered themes. These videos have inspired my own close examination of Silent Hill 3 and just how much I admire and love this game.

I also want to include a brief content warning, because this video game does feature themes of forced pregnancy, abortion, stalking, gore, harassment, and lots and lots of blood. Also, spoilers. It's a 20+ year old game but you should really play it for yourself or watch a spoiler-free walkthrough if you haven't.

I. Reality

You begin the game with a strange cutscene. An aerial view of a tea-cup ride in motion with cut-ins of what seems to be a carousel horse head shaking violently, a la Jacob's Ladder. We then zoom in on a young woman, walking into a park in the dead of night. She looks down to see herself brandishing a knife with a facial expression like she doesn't know what she's doing here.

"Where am I?" she asks the darkness.

Heather's in Lakeside Amusement Park, a place usually associated with recreation, childhood, and entertainment. But this park doesn't look right. The ground has been replaced with rusty iron grates and there are rabbit mascot costumes with bloody mouths. Heather questions whether there's a person in the costume. Iron cages hold bloody...bags? People? There's a pervasive fog in the air and, to the player, a sub-bass drone that seems to press into your ears.

You are alone in a nightmarish park with only a gate ahead of you to go through. The entrance gates of the park are locked. Locked by who? The only way to go is forward. Immediately, on going through the gate, you're accosted by strange hostile creatures.

This is your tutorial, player. Running from zombie dogs and weird tall creatures with ham-hocks for arms. You go inside the gift shop and get a brief respite from the monsters, wondering why the hell the game would start this way. Is the game glitched? There's nothing in here to get, but you get a feel for Heather's personality by examining objects, and reading the flavor text. You leave the shop and continue running past the creatures.

Going through another door, you're assaulted with the shrill grinding sound of peculiar, flying, knife-wielding things. You might check out your inventory at this time and see that you have weapons - even a frickin' SMG! But you hardly have any ammo so you don't see the point in fighting. Immediately, you're learning that killing the creatures in this game isn't worth the loss of resources.

You eventually climb up the stairs to a rollercoaster. You can walk on the tracks. What an insane idea - walking on the tracks of a rollercoaster. Where are we even going? And what are those gurgling, groaning noises in the pitch darkness? Suddenly, a coaster comes to life and before Heather can jump, she's run over. Game over. Thanks for playing.

Psyche. It was a dream.

Like the first Silent Hill, the game starts with a nightmare sequence, which serves as a brief tutorial on the controls and combat. But now, we seem to be in reality with this young girl who has woken up in a fast-food restaurant. A strange place to take a nap, maybe. It could be Heather was tired from a long day at work as a part-time cashier. Or maybe she gets sleepy after eating. Hell, maybe she's narcoleptic. This is all needless speculation, of course.

Heather's design is especially significant. She's not the typical protagonist that was par for the course of 2000s video games. You know, male, white, built a brick shithouse, and having extensive combat knowledge. Heather is a teenage girl who is, for once, not creepily sexualized like many female game characters in those days. Looking at you, Ashley Graham, and your superfluous panty shots.

Heather's face looks far more realistic, having visible eye bags and freckles. Her roots are showing, revealing that she isn't a natural blonde. Her clothing is a weird combination of colors, showing that maybe she's experimenting with her style. Maybe that is the style at her school or something. My point is that Heather is the most realistic portrayal of a teenager that I have ever seen in a game. The media tends to stereotype teenagers as moody, rebellious little brats. Sometimes, they're stoners or kids who play too much of that "rocking and rolling and hipping hopping music." And sometimes they're the goth and emo kids who their parents "just didn't understand."

Heather is...a person. A young person, yes, but a normal, well-adjusted, intelligent, breathing person.

As soon as she leaves the café, she calls her father. From her tone and smile, we can tell that she loves her dad and that they have a great relationship. She's calling him just to tell him that she's heading home. But after she hangs up, a strange man in a 1940s detective get-up starts following her, telling her something...off-putting.

"It's about your birth."

I don't know about you, but I would be more than concerned if someone said that to me. Though I'd probably be thinking it was some pro-life charlatan trying to bait me.

Heather, however, says she isn't interested.

Does that deter Douglas? Nope. He follows her to the bathroom.

If a strange middle-aged man followed me to the bathroom after questioning my birth, I'd be rummaging for my pepper spray. Heather has the same idea.

"Are you still following me?? Do I have to scream?" Heather confronts him.

"Sorry, I'll wait here." Douglas says.

Detective Douglas Cartland apparently missed the precinct seminars on harassment. Heather goes into the bathroom, refusing to go back into the hall where he is. We're immediately experiencing one of the themes this game explores: stalking and fear of strange men. Any man could have the best of intentions in talking to women, but the reality of it is that women do not know of his true intentions. Heather sees Douglas as a threat because he's just presented himself like one. Douglas may not have intended to come off as creepy, but it is extremely creepy for a middle-aged man to follow a teenage girl to a bathroom.

It's possible Heather has gone through this before, having people follow her and stalk her. As women, we are cautious of every unfamiliar man we meet, especially if we've been victims of stalking, harassment, and/or violence. Heather even has a knife in her inventory, "just in case." There are reasons why women take precautions, such as meeting in well-lit public areas with lots of people around, taking their own car when going on dates, not leaving their drinks unattended at bars or parties, and not walking alone at night. You're right, not every man is a predator - but we don't know that. Heather does not know if Douglas Cartland is a safe guy and he certainly has not done anything to prove he is, quite the opposite, actually.

We avoid Douglas by climbing out the window of the bathroom. It's alright, we can just take this alleyway down to the--oh, no. There's a van blocking this way. An oddly parked van, squeezed between the fence and the building, with no way for the driver to exit except the back. And it's a white van, too. A white van backing into the back alley of a shopping mall...maybe, I'm thinking way too much into it, but Heather has no choice but to go through a door into employee areas of the mall.

You go through the door and the chill vibes of "End of Small Sanctuary" completely fade out. Accurately named song, because the sudden silence feels ominous. For video games, exploring worlds tends to be accompanied by music, but there are moments in this game that are unsettlingly quiet. After all, this is a shopping mall, right? Why is it so quiet? Where are the employees? We are in essence exploring a liminal place...somewhere where it's usually full of people, but now empty, it just feels...wrong.

We explore the mall and discover a mess in the main areas. Plants are knocked over, there's dust and dirt all over the floor. We walk into the only open store, a clothing shop. The camera immediately centers on an abandoned handgun on the ground. Is this a similar satirical placement as the gun in the shopping basket was in Silent Hill 2, a statement on how easy it is to get access to firearms in America? Maybe it's a statement on mass shootings, since many of them happen in malls. These are just speculations on my part, though. You want some really outlandish, wild-mass-guessing theories on Silent Hill, you should read the Wiki/Fandom.

The Closer may symbolize ideas of one of the seven deadly sins; in this case, greed. Greed can extend to consumerism and materialism; their feminine form may symbolize women who go to shopping malls and relentlessly shop. They are encountered in a women's clothing store feeding on a woman, which may symbolize how "greed/consumerism/materialism feeds on women". The instruction manual for Silent Hill 3 claims Heather enjoys shopping every weekend, so the Closer may be a warning to Heather about her attachment to "worldly" things and objects.

And I thought I was reaching. This guy (it's gotta be a guy) is doing some fucking Silent Hill theory yoga over here. It's better than the circumcision theories, at least.

Also connecting the Closer to the theme of impregnation or maternity is the sounds it will emit when fallen; the Closer will make very primitive and high-pitched moaning noises, while writhing about on the floor. This can be seen as reminiscent of a female's reaction to coitus or maturbation [sic], or to other forms of sexual stimulation.

Who the fuck calls it "coitus"? Did Sheldon Cooper write this? This is giving off incel vibes, my dude.

Anyway, Heather's first real-world monster is a Closer, a monster she finds eating a corpse. I agree that the Closer has a mouth resembling genitalia. Google Image search actually blurred the pictures of the Closers, I guess because their heads look very phallic? The Closer is meant to represent an oppressive, towering figure that is blocking off Heather's path, "closing" in around her. It could be representative of how men throughout history have blocked women from what the status quo deems to be "male-only" fields. See, I can be needlessly sexist, too, Wiki-writer.

Heather's reaction to this creature is to shoot it, panicking all the while as she adjusts to the recoil. She's a teenager, not a trained S.T.A.R.S. member. She kills the Closer and tries to come to terms with this new reality. Imagine: you're living your normal life, knowing that demonic monsters don't actually exist, but then you encounter one in the flesh. You question your own sanity and whether you're dreaming or not. Heather has shifted into a reality where monsters exist and she has to survive.

II. The Nightmare Invades

Traveling through the mall, we fetch some items including the bookstore key. Heather enters the bookstore which has an exit door requiring a code. You can figure out the code by solving the Shakespeare puzzle. On Easy and Normal Puzzle Mode, this is pretty simple, but on Hard Mode...oh boy. There's a reason the Hard Mode Shakespeare Puzzle is one of the most infamously hard puzzles, if not THE most, of Silent Hill history. VoidBurger has a really good video on it as part of her excellent Silent Hill 3 Let's Play, one version that has subtitles, no commentary, and no spoilers and another version that features VoidBurger and Bobvids in-depth lore commentary.

Heather finally makes it through the door to find...a strangely dressed, shoeless, albino woman with no eyebrows. Claudia Wolf comes off as a person who has not grown up within society, speaking in a cryptic, dogmatic cadence.

Heather is not having any of this though. She is snarky and dismissive of Claudia's weirdness.

"You must try to remember me and your true self as well." Claudia opines. "The one who will lead us to Paradise with blood-stained hands."

"Wait," Heather says, her voice hardening, "did you do all this?"

"It was the hand of God."

Immediately, Heather doubles over in pain as bizarre chanting begins along with a warbling theremin. Claudia leaves the room and we're left to figure out where to go next.

The only place we can go is an elevator. Once we go in, the elevator starts without us pressing any buttons. We hear a loud burst of static and then see a radio fall from the ceiling. I always thought that was weird, like the Silent Hill devs were running out of ways for characters to find the radio so they finally just chucked it at us. The radio is how we detect monsters in the area. Better get used to the static, because monsters are everywhere in this game. After Heather picks it up, another strange thing happens: we exit the elevator and get on another elevator. Only this elevator doesn't look quite right. It's rusted, dirty, covered in grime, and--what the fuck?

Through the grating, Heather sees a...creature? It's groaning and writhing. It seems to be covered in leathery skin. This is Valtiel (val-tee-el), a monster that you'll see in the Otherworld portions of the game. His purpose will be illuminated later in this analysis, but right now, he's just a freaky monster.

Heather is visibly repulsed, asking desperate questions.

"Is this a dream? ...it's gotta be. Not even a kid could believe in this." she whimpers. "But when am I going to wake up?"

She has descended both literally and figuratively into the Otherworld. Like in the previous titles, the Otherworld is a macabre, hellish facsimile of the real world where the environments may be bloody, rotten, dilapidated, rusty, metallic, and/or viscerally disgusting. Heather's Otherworld in the shopping mall is quite dark and the disturbing howls of Doubleheads pierce the strange ambient music.

These are similar to the Groaners/Wormheads of the first Silent Hill, except these beasts have two heads, or more specifically, have a split head. Masahiro Ito, the designer of Silent Hill's monsters for the first few games, has stated the dogs to be like Cerberus, the watchdogs of Hell.

Many monsters have a split-head or double-head motif, including one of the more annoying enemies faced in the game.

If you're hearing a cacophonous grinding noise upon entering an area, you are hearing the Pendulums. Pendula? To be honest, I still don't know what exactly these are other than two fleshy heads with protruding knives. They float in the air and will only attack on their mechanical blade legs if you engage combat, which I do not recommend. They are ridiculously fast, have tiny hitboxes, and cause a lot of damage. Interestingly, if you do manage to beat one down, they'll start making bizarre animal-like sounds. Their heads constantly flip up and down like each is trying to dominate the other.

You also encounter the Numb Bodies earlier before the Otherworld shift, but they are mostly just kind of pathetic.

They look like eyeballs that grew legs. They mostly just bump into you and might block your path in high numbers. Some interpretations have compared them to sperm and, in their bigger variants, male genitalia. They emit weird donkey-like brays, as though they're runty, malformed cattle.

Heather finds a flashlight, letting her see in this dark, hellish plane of existence. Traversing the halls is much easier, but the monsters are attracted to the light. Unlike Silent Hill 2's monsters, Silent Hill 3 monsters chase Heather. James' monsters were pests you'd beat down to just get them out of the way while doing puzzles. Heather's monsters are actively hostile, attacking her viciously. The monsters aren't worth fighting in Silent Hill 3 for the most part, especially when you're just backtracking through zones. Heather doesn't exude reckless confidence in dealing with the creatures - in fact, she whimpers when the dogs chew on her legs. She's scared of them and wants to get away from them.

The symbolism of many puzzles and objects may pass you by on a first playthrough. You need to crack a walnut with a vise to get the moonstone gem inside it. The door on which you use this moonstone has a strange poem.

"Piling up the 300th day and night

From beyond the door,

cries of pain are heard

And the final destination

has become real

Though not a blessed beginning..."

It's commonly known that pregnancy lasts for nine or ten months, which is approximately 300 days. The moon has also been associated with menstruation and ovulation cycles. It's a little weird for a game puzzle, isn't it? Well, it might not be as weird as you think. After all, what is one of a teenage girl's fears? An unwanted pregnancy and the stigma that follows such a revelation.

We also come across a wire coat hanger that we need to use to reach a ladder. What have wire coat hangers been used for in history? Desperate back-alley abortions. Heather goes into a bathroom, knocks on the door of a stall, and gets a knock back. Walking away, the door slowly creeks open and inside the toilet and wall is splattered with a copious amount of blood. Bit of a mallet to the head with the menstruation symbolism, but that's a LOT of blood and it's all over the walls. These moments of dramatic symbolism aren't meant to be explained, only pondered over as you go through the game.

One of the more ridiculous puzzles is having to mix up some chlorine gas using bleach and bathroom cleaner to clear out some bugs in a hallway. You'll begin to notice more of these "things you're warned against doing" situations later. You need to make the toxic cocktail, retreat, and turn on the fan. If you try to go back in, Heather will snark (in flavor text), "I don't particularly want to die!" Unlike Harry and James, at times, Heather seems to be talking to the player in a fourth-wall sense. When checking out a shelf of wine bottles, she'll say, "I don't really feel like eating or drinking stuff from an alternate reality, okay?" This way, she relates better to the player because it establishes a strange yet endearing kinship.

The last bit of the nightmare mall has you descending a long ladder into a black hole, something SH2 did a lot of (sans ladder). Heather using a ladder to descend, though, is quite the opposite of James' reckless, thoughtless jumping into dark abysses. The act of descent is also symbolic of the thought of going to Hell. Heather reaches the bottom of the ladder, into a peculiar room with tunnels. Here, she faces off with the Splitworm, a creature displaying quite obvious sexual symbolism.

The Splitworm burrows into the tunnels as the boss fight commences, stopping occasionally to fold back its phallic jowls and reveal its horrifically toothy...orifice. The Splitworm could also be representative of childbirth. The "shell" of the Splitworm also seems to cover up the more gruesome mouth of the creature, which could be indicative of someone trying to hide a darker part of themselves.

After Heather defeats the monster, the mall shifts back to the regular world. Heather wonders if she's truly back in the real world and encounters Douglas once more. Looks like Heather never managed to escape him after all. Heather accuses Douglas of being in league with Claudia, but Douglas admits he was only hired to find Heather.

"Things are getting really screwy around here and I got a weird feeling it's got something to do with me." Heather says, more to herself than Douglas.

"What are you talking about?" Douglas rasps. "What's so special about you, anyway?"

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be so confused, would I?" Heather snaps back.

III. Walking in the Dark

The subway level is heavily inspired by the 1990 film, Jacob's Ladder, a horror movie featuring Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran who experiences terrifying occurrences with demonic entities. There was a 2019 remake, but it's nowhere near as good as the first film. Jacob's Ladder also influenced Silent Hill'2 design, shown by James Sunderland's army jacket and segments from the Otherworld hospital level.

Heather decides to take the subway home, a subway that is utterly devoid of any other human being. Huh. I don't think we're back in Kansas, Heather. This part of the game explores the idea of liminal spaces, places that are usually full of people but now are barren. It's also terrifying because we're essentially a teenage girl traveling alone in the darkness, something women and girls are warned against. We're told to carry pepper spray, a knife, or weave our keys through our knuckles in case we're attacked. This level plays on these fears, spawning two articles to read as you're exploring. These are entirely optional, but you would assume they were important. The first is a news article detailing how someone died after falling onto the tracks. The next is from an occult magazine discussing how the ghosts of accident victims tend to linger around the places they were killed.

Even with the map, the subway is a confusing mess of hallways and stairs. I implore players to play the game with headphones because the sound design of the game is phenomenal. Akira Yamaoka implemented clever auditory dynamics to create tension. You'll travel through the subway and hear a distant wailing noise. In later levels, you'll explore office spaces and hear what seems to be footsteps above you. This is a game that doesn't offer a release from tension, like horror games often do with jump scares. You are always on edge, expecting the worst.

Silent Hill 3, at least to me, always seems like it was tormenting not only Heather, but the player as well. The game subverts many horror clichés and often trolls the player. There's no greater example of this than the way you progress through the subway level. You come across an ominous door located a ways from the bottom track, illuminated by a red light. Gee, looks like the way to go, right? However, upon stepping down onto the tracks and checking the door, the game spawns a demon dog ambush. If you don't get up to the platform fast enough, you get run over. If you do, the subway stops, allowing Heather to get on. That's right - the red herring door ambush is necessary to progress in the game.

On the subway, Heather traverses through the cars, each one disappearing if you try to walk back. You can go out the back of the train and throw yourself onto the tracks for a pointless death scene. This game has considerably more optional death scenes than the previous titles, perhaps an inner inflection on Heather's fear of the world around her.

In the subway level, you'll encounter a new monster, the Insane Cancer.

It's a corpulent mass of diseased flesh. You'll often find them lying down, impeding your path like a gross Snorlax. Having no flute, you'll have to shotgun blast them until they deflate. Their name offers an insight into their symbolism, being malignant beasts that look like tumors. The Insane Cancers block Heather's path, much like how the Otherworld prevents Heather from taking the easiest path home.

Can I mention just how creepy it is to be traveling by train to God (heh) knows where, still not in Silent Hill? It means that the power controlling Silent Hill's manifestation has extended beyond the foggy borders of the town. There's also a vital plot point that hasn't been revealed yet which explains this, but we'll reflect on that later. It's just horrifying to think that this power is capable of transfiguring any city or possibly shifting back and forth between alternate dimensions.

Before you get off the train, you can check the first car to find out there was no conductor even operating the train. Does the game explain this? No, and it's creepier to leave that bit of mystique. There's environmental storytelling in this game that will make you ask questions the game will not answer. Like, why do we have to go through a sewer? And if playing on Hard Mode or New Game Plus, why are the fucking walls bleeding? This game was a first in video game design to incorporate dynamic textures moving in real-time as you explore an area. The textures are used more in later levels like the nightmare hospital and chapel, often taking on disturbingly visceral effects like bloody, fleshy walls and slithering black tendrils.

The sewers are not worth fighting through. It is filled with pendulums who will team up with the other monsters to KO your ass. There's even a pointless troll hallway full of monsters that leads nowhere. A sewer is already a grungy place to be, made much worse with bleeding walls (that hurt you on Hard Mode) and the terrifying darkness only illuminated by your flashlight.

You'll come across a room with a door splattered in blood, the handwritten danger sign seemingly fallen off the door. Heather can read a note from someone lamenting the deaths of two friends who were eaten by a sewer monster. This note is somewhat comical, like something you'd come across in a Resident Evil game. This also suggests that the monster exists outside of whatever influence is manifesting Heather's fears. Or maybe, this is a façade entirely made up by the malevolent power just to freak out Heather. Regardless, you can enter the room and attempt to cross the bridge, ignoring the warnings. Maybe the monster is just a minor boss you'll have to shoot and we have a shotgun, what can go wrong?

When Heather crosses the bridge, a cutscene will trigger in which a worm-like beast will wrap around Heather's leg and drag her into the murky depths, the blood reddening the water as her screams echo off the walls.

No fighting, no gameplay, just straight-up kills you.

(To be continued...)

(Vocal has a 5000 word limit so I'm going to stop it here and continue on in another post. Thank you for reading, stay tuned!)