Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy User Manual
Page 119
Trigger Happy
121
characters are incompetently written and amazingly
badly acted. Some films have a “so bad it’s good”
quality, but this hack attempt at drama is just so bad it’s
appalling. If it’s supposed to be like a film in this way,
it’s a film you wouldn’t ever want to see.
However, what Silent Hill does successfully breed
from its cinematic forebears is quite simple: a powerful
sense of atmosphere. Tense wandering in dark
environments is interrupted by shocks, sudden
appearances of blood-curdling monsters. Silence is
interrupted by grating noise, making you jump and
increasing your nervousness. The same sort of
atmospheric virtue is present in the Resident Evil series
of zombie videogames, which themselves are the
subject of interesting cross-media developments. It was
long rumored that George Romero was to make a live-
action film based on Resident Evil, which would have
been apt, not only because he directed a highbudget
television commercial for the second game in the
franchise, but because the Resident Evil games
themselves cheerfully lift wholesale the camera angles
and action sequences from Romero’s own classic
zombie flicks such as Dawn of the Dead.
Why is it particularly the horror genre, and to a
lesser extent science fiction, that largely provides the