Silent Hill – Jacob's Ladder. The unusual inspirations behind famous video games

The Silent Hill series, especially its first installments, is one of the few examples of horror movies that can scare you from start to finish with a stuffy, depressing atmosphere and really disturbing images rather than cheesy jump scares. You can still debate what the title Silent Hill really is – a town in the US, a kind of purgatory, a hallucination, a place in another dimension, and maybe something else. Fans have found dozens of different references and inspirations in the subsequent installments of the series, some of which were even confirmed by members of Team Silent on various occasions. Among all these inspirations, it's worth highlighting one – the movie Jacob's Ladder – where many scenes resemble those from games, and which is actually one of the favorite works of Akihiro Imamura according to his own opinion (he's the programmer of Team Silent, a producer of the second part of the game and sub-producer of part four).

Jacob's Ladder is a psychological horror from 1990. It tells the story of an ordinary postal worker, a Vietnam War veteran, who becomes tormented by strange visions and nightmares. Together with him, we begin to wonder if these are the effects of madness, hallucinations, demon possession, PTSD – or if perhaps he's actually in a completely unknown realm, like some kind of purgatory? This main concept should sound familiar, but the movie is primarily a source of iconic locations seen in the game.

What draws attention here most of all is the hospital straight from a nightmare, and the journey through its corridors that the bedridden Jacob makes – it's difficult not to see the parallels between the Brookheaven hospital in Silent Hill. The filmmakers also came up the famous and disturbing fast monster's convulsions, which is also characteristic of the creatures in the game. Then, there are patients who walk on stumps similar to the nightmarish nurses. We can also see Jacob on the subway station at Bergen Street – the same station that Heather Mason is looking for in Silent Hill 3. Plus, there are even smaller details, like the same initials (and indeed, the same name in two variants) and similar jackets of James Sunderland and Jacob Singer, or the Lyne House key in the video game series' part two, referring to the movie director's name. Although the game has a series of its own adaptations, it's definitely worth completing the set with Jacob's Ladder.

1. Silent Hill in our encyclopedia