I will never get over Kindergarten Cop’s influence on Silent Hill

Play the original Silent Hill for the first time in 1999, many of its influences were immediately apparent: Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror film Jacob’s ladder and adjustment of Lolita; William Peter Blattys The Exorcist 3; Stanley Kubrick The shining; the science fiction and horror works of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman) and Dean Koontz.

That lasted until the next decade hardcore Silent Hill fans revealed the undeniable influence of Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy film Kindergarten agent about the design and architecture of the game. That might be the strangest revelation about Team Silent’s seminal horror title, more so than any bizarre UFO or Shiba Inu-related secret ending in the franchise.

The biggest reference is with Silent Hill‘s Midwich Elementary School – from which it takes its name Village of the damned. It is based directly on the school of Kindergarten agent, as the video below thoroughly illustrates. (In the movie it’s called Astoria Elementary, but it’s a real elementary school called John Jacob Astor Elementary.)

The Silent Hill development team turned to Kindergarten agent, released in 1990, to give their game an authentic small-town American feel, from the yellow school buses to the posters decorating the school hallways. Some claim that the influences go deeper Silent Hill‘s main character Harry Mason is dressed similarly to Schwarzenegger’s John Kimble. Both are stories about missing children, and both end happily with the male lead becoming a new father figure.

I choose to believe a different truth. Just someone from the team Real holds Kindergarten agenta very strange and tonally chaotic film, and wild Reitman’s highly regarded Schwarzenegger vehicle (above Junior And Twins) are due props.

Silent Hill is, after all, a love letter to the team’s influences. The in-game map is filled with streets named after genre writers such as James Ellroy, Carl Sagan, Robert Bloch, Michael Crichton and Richard Matheson. Reference information about in-game newspapers The silence of the lambs serial killer Buffalo Bill. Four teachers at Midwich Elementary have been named after members of Sonic Youth. One of the city’s bridges is named after Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle. Even the strange UFO endings now read like homage.

Silent Hill writer Hiroyuki Owaku would later take those Lynchian influences with him Silent Hill 2with a scene torn from it Blue velvet, with Pyramid Head replacing Frank Booth. Later games would reference the Silent Hill games themselves Silent Hill 3 harkening back to the story of Harry Mason and Silent Hill 4: The Roomconnecting back with small characters in 2 And 3. Nearly every game in the franchise would also implement its own version of the comic UFO ending.

In a 2013 Famitsu interview: Silent Hill director Keiichiro Toyama talked about what influenced him when designing the original game.

“I’ve never been into the really gory, shocking kind of horror movie, so I was a little disappointed when we started,” Toyama said. “What I’m a fan of is occult stuff and UFO stories and so on; that and I had seen a lot of David Lynch films. So it was really a matter of me taking what was on my shelves and taking the more horror-oriented aspects of what I found. I really didn’t think (Silent Hill) was really a horror game, and it was quite a surprise to me when people told me it was scary after it came out!”

Fortunately, for self-proclaimed scaredy cats like Toyama, that horror can be somewhat numbed when you reimagine it Silent Hill like just a nightmare in the world of Kindergarten agent.