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Letter from the Editor
Letter from the Editor
OUR SPECIAL PLACE
By Brock Wilbur
Welcome, dearest reader and travel companion, to the October issue of The Pitch. As per tradition, this issue has been lightly haunted with a dash or two of Spooky Season offerings amid our more standard editorial fare. We’ve got some big ideas at play—killer food and drink, frightful toys, monstrous delights, and even a few local sports haunts.
Up front this month, I thought I’d talk about my favorite place in the world—a seaside resort town that I’ve spent hundreds of hours in but will never have the opportunity to visit. As anyone who knows me even in passing can predict from this setup, I’m here today to spread the good word about a happenin’ little spot called Silent Hill.
Our special place.
In 1999, the game Silent Hill was released on the Playstation and immediately broke ground as the defining Millennial creepypasta experience—break brains and sleep cycles for those who dared tread its digital grounds. As one of the first big forays into the survival horror genre, Silent Hill defined itself by being the opposite of a power fantasy. It’s about weakness and humanity and discomfort. You aren’t some supercop hero with an infinite supply of rocket launchers gunning your way through hordes of zombies. You’re just some guy who can’t find your kid. You’re not particularly strong or smart or brave. There’s a world filled with monsters, but you’re not special in your ability to deal with them. You can pick up things like a knife or a bit of pipe and try to hit them with it, but you’re more likely to get killed in the process. When you do find a gun, you’re not very good at aiming it; there aren’t nearly enough bullets, and mostly, the bullets seem to annoy shadowy, slithery things that don’t like you very much.
Silent Hill as a game isn’t especially fun. But for a very select group of people—much like those who actually enjoy Jeppson’s Malört or the films of Richard Kelly—those who love it, love it. It’s a lot like that meme of Trent Reznor, where he promises: “We’re here to have a bad time.” Yes. Yes, we are.
I’m one of those people. To me, it’s almost impossible that the first Silent Hill game exists, much less than it spawned decades of sequels, spin-offs, movie adaptations, comic books, and so on. That’s not because the game was popular or sold well. It’s because the game introduced a world that is too intriguing to leave behind.
Silent Hill is an abandoned resort town covered in fog that used to be a real nice place to hang out. Where there was once a bustling town, there are now a lot of monsters and nasty secrets. The thing that makes each reimagining of Silent Hill so engaging is that this is not Hell on Earth, it is simply a place. It is a place that changes based on who is there. It’s a destination that adapts to the dreams and nightmares of the people who come into contact with it. Silent Hill has its own history, but mostly, it’s just a mirror to hold up to the player, reflecting back the darkest, deepest parts of their psyche and occasionally refracting that into slimy things with too many teeth.
That idea—that you change the places you inhabit just by being there—has oddly taught me a lot about who I am, who I was, and how I interact with the world today. It’s perhaps odd to take life advice from a scary video game, but I could have found my inner truth in much worse places. [Raccoon City from Resident Evil, for example.]
Along that path, I met someone a few years back named Whitney Chavis. She’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the largest private collection of Silent Hill memorabilia. During the pandemic, we did a little project together where we revisited every bit of Silent Hill together—all the games, movies, books, and even a pachinko machine. As huge fans with too many thoughts about what Silent Hill is and what it means to us, we documented a series of conversations into a gigantic book that we just released: Our Special Place: Conversations on Silent Hill. With all the proceeds from the book going to Extra Life and the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, that’s a fun haunted tome that is now available wherever haunted tomes are sold. If you’re like us and truly enjoy having a really bad time every now and then, we invite you to check it out.
Alright. Thanks for taking a detour with me. Please be good to each other this Halloween season. Remember not to believe anyone who tells you that trick-or-treaters are being given drugs. Or, if you find someone who is giving out drugs to trick-or-treaters, please let us know where we should start trick-or-treating.
Pitch in, and we’ll make it through,
