A couple weeks ago, we learned that Brotherhood of the Wolf and Silent Hill director Christophe Gans’ new Silent Hill movie, which is said to be “totally independent from the two previous movies”, had secured funding and would begin filming soon. Now the German website Filmportal has revealed a plot synopsis for Gans’ Return to Silent Hill, and where filming is going to take place!
According to the website, Return to Silent Hill has the following synopsis (using an online German to English translator): Driven by the shadows of his past, James Sunderland returns to Silent Hill to find his lost love, Mary Crane. But the dark, depressing small town is no longer the place from his memories. He meets characters who seem all too familiar and who try to divert him from his search for Mary. The longer he searches for Mary, the more he begins to wonder if this is still reality – or if he has fallen into the dark underworld of Jacob Crane.
They also mention that Jeremy Irvine (Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again) has been cast in the film, possibly as James Sunderland.
Gans directed the 2006 version of Silent Hill from a screenplay he wrote with Roger Avary and Nicolas Boukhrief, and will be directing this new film from a screenplay he has written with Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider.
Return to Silent Hill is being produced by Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, Philipp Kreuzer, Joe Neurauter, John Jencks, Jay Taylor, and Alexa Seligman. A company called The Veterans is handling the international sales. Benoit Debie is the cinematographer, Felicity Abbott the production designer, and Sébastian Prangère the editor. The movie is a German-British-Serbian co-production, coming to us from Maze Pictures with Metropolitan, Davis Films, The Electric Shadow Company, and Lotus Wallace. The FFF Bayern is supporting the project with 1 million euros.
Filmportal reports that filming will take place in Munich, Penzing, Nuremberg, Rossberg, and around Lake Ammer.
The new film is based on the story of the video game Silent Hill 2, and Gans has said that it will follow “a young guy coming back to Silent Hill, where he has known a great love and what he’s going to find is a pure nightmare.” Gans has also said that Return to Silent Hill “respects the way Silent Hill has evolved. Most of the time, these are stand-alone stories. Silent Hill is a bit like The Twilight Zone, the fourth dimension, a place where anything and everything can happen. I worked on a new Silent Hill which is a Silent Hill of the year 2023 – because the film would be released next year – and not a Silent Hill as I imagined it in 2006. It is a Silent Hill for today’s audiences while being ultra respectful of the saga. I’m aware that Silent Hill is a very big video game franchise, and a work of art in the noble sense of the word. The people who thought up Silent Hill put a lot of their guts into it. If I know them well, they are people of great integrity. For me, it was important to design a Silent Hill for today’s audience. It’s clear that today’s horror movies don’t look like the horror movies of 2006, and so much the better. Not that the horror films of 2007 weren’t good, but every genre goes through an evolution. I’m trying to take into account what I’ve seen recently, what’s most original and amazing in horror films, and see if Silent Hill has the seeds, or even the expression of that. Silent Hill has always been an unusual game and ahead of its time.“
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