After many years, Silent Hill 4 is finally getting its due with a great port from GOG.
I give it a strong recommendation! Like, many thumbs up.
However, one part of the game has always struck me as very unsettling and we’ll get into that right… about… now!
Spying on Eileen
In Silent Hill 4, you play as Henry Townshend (I always thought it was Townsend…), a dude who gets trapped in his apartment by a serial killer named Walter Sullivan. Walter has a plot to be reunited with his mother, which he believes is Henry’s apartment… yup, welcome to Silent Hill (or Ashfield Heights in this case).
Living in the apartment nextdoor is Eileen Galvin who is also part of Walter’s 21 Sacraments as “The Mother Reborn.”
Throughout the first half of the game, Henry spies on Eileen through a peephole in his wall to learn what’s happening in the outside world. The hole was created by investigative journalist Joseph Schreiber, the apartment’s previous tenant, who had also hoped to escape the occult shenanigans created by Walter.
We spy on Eileen eating, talking to her friends, watching TV, getting ready for a party, and, as shown in some deleted content, changing clothes.
It’s voyeuristic… and to what end? To protect her from Walter? To warn her? We certainly don’t do either of those things as she gets violently assaulted later in the game. Staring at Eileen is a game mechanic that Henry never actually addresses as a thing. He never tells Eileen that he had been spying on her.
However, our spying eye is punished by a jump scare involving the Robbie the Rabbit doll sitting on Eileen’s bed.
This jump scare is also the source of some of the oldest Internet videos I’ve ever watched, so there’s that too. Remember justin.tv? Yeah, I don’t either.
This jump scare happens right after Walter assaults Eileen and she’s sent to hospital, but what is Robbie saying to us with his little, bloody paws?
What makes it unsettling?
What makes this jump scare unsettling is that it turns this sense of comfort that we had spying on Eileen on its head. It becomes almost habit to just check the hole whenever you return to the apartment.
We’re confronted by this image of the Silent Hill mascot with a bloody face pointing us out and telling us that he can see what we’re doing: spying on a young woman in her bedroom.
This YouTuber makes an interesting connection between our voyeurism and the giant Eileen head that appears in the game. What giant Eileen head, you ask?
Henry finds this giant, moaning head in the game’s hospital level. It stares at you as you move about the room and makes sexual noises.
In a way, it’s Eileen staring back from the peephole giving you the same level of discomfort that your spying would have given her — if she’d known you were doing it, which Henry, again, never admits to doing.
And it’s a huge wrong. Voyeurism is a crime and an invasion of privacy. Silent Hill 4 turns it into a game mechanic without function. Spying on Eileen is a pleasurable thing — you hope to see something titillating — at least until Robbie the Rabbit reminds us we shouldn’t be doing it.
Women’s suffering in Silent Hill
Spying is the least of the transgressions against women in the video game series, which I’ll get into… in a very inaccurate and abbreviated way… now!
In Silent Hill, we learn that Alessa Gillespie was burned alive for the sake of creating extreme trauma so she could birth a god. Lisa Garland was blackmailed over her drug addiction into keeping Alessa, who was suffering with burns over 100% of her body, alive for many, many years.
In Silent Hill 2, Mary Sunderland was diagnosed with a fatal disease and was killed by her sexually repressed husband. Maria is a weird, exotic dancer doppelgänger of Mary who is overtly sexualized and gets violently murdered by a spear-wielding Pyramid Head. Angela Orosco is a sexual abuse victim who ends up immolating herself because of the shame she feels after confronting a monster version of her father in a room filled with penetrating, metal pistons.
In Silent Hill 3, Heather/Cheryl Mason gets attacked by a giant penis monster and later performs an abortion on herself expel a god from her womb. Claudia Wolf, who was beaten and abused so badly by her father that she was forced to believe in his weird occult bullshit, impregnates herself with the god that Heather aborts, which then kills her. In fact, the whole game is built on Valtiel, the big bad of the game, using Heather’s fears over sex, rape, and abortion against her, so… great.
And in Silent Hill 4, Eileen Galvin is The Mother Reborn who needs to die in order to give birth to… something? It’s a little unclear; however, she’s one of two female characters in the game (the other being Cynthia Velasquez who is comically sexualized) and both are targets of gigantic misogynist Walter Sullivan. Eileen also spends most of the game running around in a skimpy party dress getting weapons like a riding crop — perhaps nods to Poison from Final Fight.
Basically how Silent Hill treats women.
There are thematic similarities between Silent Hill’s female characters whether they’re being forced to give birth like Alessa, Heather, Claudia, and Eileen, overtly sexualized then violently killed like Maria and Cynthia, or victims of abuse by men, sexually or otherwise, like Angela or Lisa.
Meanwhile, the male protagonists rarely suffer the same extremes the female characters do. Harry Mason dies in Silent Hill 3. James Sunderland has to confront that he killed his wife, but he gets a nice love letter that absolves him for doing it. And Henry Townshend has to fight some ghosts and kill Walter Sullivan, but nothing really bad happens to him.
Eileen’s case is, I think, one of the more extreme examples of Silent Hill’s relationship with women combining Walter Sullivan’s misogyny and our participation in that through the peephole.
So, who is this man and why does he hate women so much?
Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan was initially mentioned in a newspaper clipping in Silent Hill 2 and in the Trick of Treat elevator game before becoming the main antagonist of Silent Hill 4.
The clip above details how Walter murdered two children and then said he was possessed by a demon wearing a red hood before killing himself in prison.
In Silent Hill 4, we learn that Walter’s parents abandoned him as a newborn and he then spent years growing up at Wish House, which was an orphanage run by The Order on Toluca Lake.
To say Walter was abused is an understatement with people like Jimmy Stone running things and the Water Prison, ugh, worst level and worst place in Silent Hill.
Does childhood trauma somehow excuse him murdering 21 people and violently attacking Eileen? No.
As The Mother Reborn, Eileen embodies Walter’s original mother who abandoned him. And we see how much Walter hates his original mother in the aftermath of his violent attack on Eileen.
There are also creatures in the game like the Patient, which is a disfigured women. There are disembowelled female mannikins. And this scene in the game, which c’mon!
Walter hates women viscerally and his misogyny echoes the feeling toward women present throughout the series whether it’s Valtiel or James Sunderland.
Walter displays it openly and targets Eileen — who we have also spied on.
Am I saying that we, as players, are as bad as Walter? No. I doubt many of us would spy on someone in the real world because we know deep down that it’s wrong. So, why do we keep returning to the hole?
Silent Hill 4 turned the male gaze into an unsettling game mechanic, which gives us insight and access into the power a killer like Walter wields against women.
***
I really like the Silent Hill series of games and have written about it a lot in the past, but it’s hard to ignore the built-in misogyny.
Women’s bodies are used as tools for the narrative development and to create a sense of visceral body horror that freaks out the player.
And very few female characters in the game get a chance to fight back, not even Eileen Galvin with her ability to literally hit back against the monsters around her. And even then, she taps into some latent mothering instinct and even feels bad for Walter.
Why the hell should she feel bad for Walter? He beat the crap out of her, left her for dead, and planned to kill her using literal Death Machine, so he could get the lease on some apartment. She should hate him as much as Heather hates Claudia Wolf.
I still like Silent Hill 4 and recognize that the series is in the “psychological” horror genre, but the way it interacts with women’s bodies is kinda bleh.
People will excuse the series by saying, oh, well, Valtiel is just using his powers to enhance the fears of a character like Heather Mason. It’s all just part of the story. No one gets hurt. Why’re you making me question my enjoyment of a game series that seems to employ misogyny as the central motivation for most of its villains?
This reflection gives me a bit more appreciation for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which delves a little deeper into Harry Mason’s psychological state before revealing, spoilers, that the whole game was just us watching Cheryl Mason talking to a menacing psychiatrist… wait a minute, spying on a young woman’s psychiatric appointment is kinda troubling now that I mention it… what the hell Silent Hill.
VR Goggles 
I entirely agree with you and the contents of this article. I will now go outside and touch grass.
Finally somebody said it. I’m actually playing the remake of SH2 and this is exactly why I can’t continue playing it. The misogynistic view in the game is to much for me. Not because it exists but because it doesn’t act on it !!! and doesn’t give females ( and males…) characters the opportunity to act on it. The only interaction is the discovery of the misogynistic way the all series is played or to act for the worst on it.
I personally can’t let this go like we used to do in the 1990’s / 2000’s. ( And yes I was born during this time too).
“It’s a feature, not a bug” The misogyny in display is not a cheap horror trick, the games are actively depicting it to criticize it. SH3 pretty much puts the player in the shoes of a teenage girl with very human fears that are unique to womanhood, and thus a male gamer wouldn’t know but the game does a good job portraying it through its themes and symbolism. SH4’s Walter shows us a portrait of a boy who grew up without maternal love and was systematically abused and conditioned into a religious nutjob. It makes a case why motherhood is so essential and vital to men. You aren’t meant to sympathize with Walter as a whole, it’s his innocence that we’re meant to see. Kid Walter is that boy before all the systematic hatred was taught to him, he saves Eileen from Adult Walter who I agree is very misogynistic and brutal towards women. James is a character the narrative doesn’t exactly absolves him.
First of all, I want to say how much I love this article. I think the writer should write even more about Silent Hill. This is kind of stuff that makes me think about the best kind of Buzzfeed articles from 2013, a very specific year to point out.
To Wisterium, I don’t believe motherhood is vital to how good men grow up. What about men with a single father or two fathers? They can become good people, too. What’s more important is a society that supports parents of all kinds and fosters a child’s growth. No one provided Walter’s mother help when her husband was verbally abusive. The foster care system failed Walter, too. If society was built around supporting parents and children more then we’d have less reason to have horror stories about characters like Walter, an orphan archetype villain.
I have also seen commented that it’s hard for male gamers to understand what it’s like to be a woman. I think then it’s important for people to read books like Know My Name, which is a first hand account of sexual assault. It’s a very poignant memoir. It’s probably a better way to understand what it’s like to be a woman in today’s society compared to the Silent Hill series, which is horror fantasy and therefore not that realistic.
I also believe in civil online discourse where we respectfully read what someone has written and also comment respectfully like Wisterium. It it important to have viewpoints that differ from the writer on this site. It is important to make your points with the respect I would like to be afforded.
SIlent Hill is a great series and hope more people will experience it whether playing the remake or GOG version of Silent Hill 4.
Hi, I didn’t expect a reply. Unfortunately I have to disagree with some of your points because I feel you’re being a bit unfair.
For starters, I think more games like SH3 should touch upon those type of themes using fantastical frames. Because the message and the themes reach further than they would’ve done so on their own otherwise. Not to dismiss the book you mentioned. But we have to be understand, these are hard topics to depict or to invite people to have a conversation. Having media like Silent Hill 3 to open the conversation is incredibly productive, another game that uses a horror frame is Mouthwashing, and it invited a lot of conversation about sexual assault and how figures of authority often sweep aside those incidents. Of course, that’s not to say that gamers would be expert once they’re done playing, but they have a frame of reference to some of the struggles that women face.
The first game in the series actually makes a case for fatherhood. In that sense, it might make Harry Mason unconventional in his role as a horror protagonist despite being male. The producers chose Harry to depict nurturing fatherhood, a father willing to go to hell and back to protect his daughter, they said that people often imagine only a mother being able to do that. Come the Silent Hill movie adaptation and they changed Harry Mason for Rose, and the director said something along the lines of not imagining a father going through that but a mother is the logical choice. The series has always taken interesting directions with their protagonists and antagonists. I agree, there’s always going to be cases that prove or disprove something. I’m just pointing out one of the themes SH4, I’m not saying that what they said will always be true. But in the case of Walter he really did need that maternal love and was only met with cruel adults that abused him and terrorize him.
As for the SH2 Remake, I’d say it’s a mixed bag. There’s a lot of nuance that was lost from the original version of SH2. The story has certainly been presented in a more digestible package, which might get more people into the series but I personally feel like it’ll be to a detriment since there was more to SH2 than just its story. I’d go as far to say I’m a bit disappointed the performance falls short for James, he sounds a lot more sympathetic whereas OG James sounded like he didn’t care if you hated by the end because he hates himself for what he did. Oh, the endings are a let down too.