"In My Restless Dreams, I See That Town": a Narratological Perspective on the Fantastic City of Silent Hill

In analyzing the narrative modes of the videogame language, it is easy to record a recurring and well-established practice of extrapolating and reworking of thematic-formal motives and strategies coming from the vast mode of the fantastic, without these, however, being able to coalesce into – in almost all cases – a truly uncanny outcome, or to create that essential condition of deep unresolved uneasiness and uncertainty found, on the contrary, in the literary genre. Precisely in its appeal to the rich tradition of the nineteenth-twentieth-century fantastic, and because of its aesthetically pleasing refinement, absolutely original, all aimed at achieving a specific hesitant tension throughout the whole gaming experience, Silent Hill's saga is one of the most successful examples in transposing the fantastic into the new media of the videogame. The fundamental importance of the spatial aspect, common to both the fantastic narrative and the videogame «text», finds expression in the imaginary little town that gives its name to the series, in one of the most scary and iconic depictions of the urban environment; a context, in other words, both familiar and reassuring, that turns into an inconceivable crossroads of disturbing alternative worlds and nightmare dimensions that in their continuous overlapping with and substitute for reality determine its inevitable crushing, to the point of denying the very possibility of its representability.