A Town Called Malice: Did a town in Pennsylvania really inspire ‘Silent Hill’?
Eternally grey skies. Smoke-like fog is choking the life out of everything it touches. Dilapidated buildings towering over you, crumbling from neglect.
The foulest creatures ever spat onto this Earth, staggering towards you, nought but hate in their hearts and the sinking feeling that you’re going to die in this hell-hole. But enough about living in London in January 2026, let’s talk about Silent Hill.
Beginning in 1999, the Silent Hill franchise is one of the most recognisable and beloved in the history of both horror and video games, with a few of its entries being hailed as some of the best video games ever made. The title of the series comes from the town that the initial entries in the franchise are based on, a small town gone to rot with more than a little of David Lynch’s masterpiece, Twin Peaks, in its black, hollowed-out heart.
It’s almost as if this is what happens after Lynch’s series finishes and the evil spirit BOB has his way with the town. It’s not the only thing that inspired the games’ iconic setting, however. The works of Stephen King are also a huge factor, specifically the way works like The Mist depict corrupted visions of small-town America. There’s also a long-standing rumour that a real-life town in Pennsylvania inspired the look of Silent Hill as well.
Looking into it further, you can imagine that Centralia, Pennsylvania, would be a godsend to any self-respecting horror story. A ghost town whose abandonment was caused by the coal mine that lies beneath the entire town being set ablaze in a tragic accident. The first began in 1962, and for the next 20 years, the inhabitants of the town tried to live life as normal, trying to ignore the inferno raging mere metres under their basements.
In the early 1980s, however, there was no other option. The town had to be evacuated quickly. By the early 1990s, Centralia was a ghost town.
Did this town inspire Silent Hill?
You can imagine how much of a godsend this would have been to someone looking to make a piece of horror media, right?
A whole society where all the trappings are still there, buildings, roads, even some cars left behind in the panic, but without the thing that makes a town a town, the people. Only eerie emptiness for miles around, the presence of things we recognise only serving to heighten our alienation and paranoia.
It’s understandable, but not true…sort of. You see, the Silent Hill of the video game was not inspired by Centralia. The developers of the game mentioned scoping out some similarly abandoned towns in Chicago for inspiration for the original 1999 game, but not Centralia. However, the Pennsylvania town was a huge inspiration for Christophe Gans when he was tapped up to make a film adaptation of the game series in the mid-2000s.
That’s where the connection really comes from. Gans, along with screenwriter Roger Avery, based their vision of Silent Hill so heavily on the Pennsylvania town that the working title of the film was Centralia. All the way down to making their Silent Hill lie on top of a coal mine that has been on fire for decades. Gans said as much in an interview promoting the picture, saying that “we used [what] had happened to the city of Centralia to feed the mythology of Silent Hill.”
Not what you’d want your home town to inspire, is it? I’m not even talking about the horrible story behind it, that would be a rad thing to tell your mates about. But inspiring the 2006 Silent Hill calamity?! I can’t think of a worse fate for a town.