LOS ANGELES, Feb 4 — French director Christophe Gans has indicated that he is returning to the Silent Hill franchise, with Fatal Frame also in his sights.
Having steered the original adaptation of survival horror game Silent Hill in 2006, Christophe Gans appears set to sit in the directors’ chair of a third movie in the franchise.
“I’ve got two horror films on the go with [producer] Victor Hadida,” he told French website AlloCine.
“It will always be set within the atmosphere of a small American town, devastated by Puritanism.”
“I think it’s time to do another one.”
The original Silent Hill movie, based on a video game franchise that debuted in 1999, was followed by a sequel Silent Hill: Revelation, inspired by the third game in the series.
Silent Hill pulled in just over US$100 million (RM412 million) at the international box office on a production budget of US$50 million.
While the second film did reasonably well — a comparatively lower budget of US$20 million was met by more modest but still admirable US$56 million returns — it went ahead without Gans’ involvement and was slated by reviewers and cinemagoers despite the addition of several high-profile actors: Kit Harrington and Sean Bean (Game of Thrones), Carrie-Ann Moss (The Matrix) and Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) among them.
“Honestly? I never watched it,” Gans said, saying that he was approached over the project but wanted to stick more closely to the original material. “Unfortunately for Silent Hill: Revelations, the public’s verdict was brutal so, again, I have no regrets,” he laughed.
As well as another Silent Hill, Gans is also developing another turn of the century, Japanese-made survival horror for the screen: Acclaimed supernatural photography game Project Zero (known as Fatal Frame in North America) is in his sights.
Like Silent Hill, it launched as a PlayStation 2 exclusive and, in accordance with Gans’ philosophy outlined above, will keep with its original Japanese setting — “I don’t want to uproot it from its Japanese haunted house context,” he said.
Silent Hill has been on horror game fans’ radars since iconic Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding game director Hideo Kojima left the franchise’s Japanese developer and publisher Konami after nearly 30 years on company books.
He had been working on an abruptly cancelled franchise reboot with movie director and producer Guillermo del Toro and film and TV actor Norman Reedus, both of whom ended up in Death Stranding. In December 2019, an unconfirmed rumour linked Kojima with a revived Silent Hill project. — AFP-Relaxnews
