Silent Hill and Fear

If you've never played a Silent Hill game before, I suggest you go out and rent one right now. It's one of the few survival horror games that are actually good. My roommate mentioned something about it to me today while I was in a half asleep stupor. When I got up I thought of how much fun it would be to play them again. You can get some good prices on used PSX and PS2 games on half.com. Most of the Silent Hill games are out for PC too I believe.


So anyways, what I want to do over Xmas break is buy at least one of them, if not the whole series, and play them at 3 in the morning, in the dark, volume turned way up, while wired on caffeine or maybe ginseng. My goal is to scare the living hell out of myself.

I don't know about you, but movies never seem to actually scare me. Every now and then I'll jump at those "cheep shots" the film directors make, you know the real quiet, innocent scene and then a sudden loud noise that turns out to be nothing anyways. That isn't being scared, it's a natural reaction. Now I remember the one time I played Silent Hill 3 in my room by myself. I think I was roughly 15 at this time. Well, after playing for a while I was literally afraid of being alone in the dark in my room. Luckily, it wore off after a few days. That is being scared.


I feel like I haven't been genuinely scared in a long time. Usually fear is thought of as something negative, but I think the only thing that's negative about fear is the actual danger that it is often accompanied with. Think about it, I would be scared of a gun is pointed to my head because of the possibility of premature death. That's dangerous, so it's bad. Going into a (good) haunted house would scare me, but there's no real danger, so it's good, kind of like eustress. It's good provided it's not a permanent fear and doesn't develop into some kind of phobia.

So my goal is to scare myself silly in a safe environment. Besides, what's better than getting to play a cute blonde chick AND kill zombies. Nothing probably.