Something Silent Hills related is happening and it involves a prominent Japanese horror artist.
As spotted on ResetEra (opens in new tab), artist Suehiro Maruo shared an intriguing pair of images on his Instagram account, along with the caption “Afternoon invitations hope you’ll join in.” The image on the left is of a display of some kind with the words “Silent Hills” on it (and the Japanese katakana transliteration for Silent Hills below) and the image on the right is taken outside of the entrance of Konami’s Tokyo headquarters.
With word of a Silent Hills revival (opens in new tab) circulating, it’s enticing to assume that Maruo is coming on board to lend some of his horror chops to the production (assuming you enjoy his special brand of horror, which involves lots of licking eyeballs). According to the rumors, Sony is helping to mediate a revived relationship between Hideo Kojima and Konami in order to bring Silent Hills back to life, probably as an upcoming PS5 game (opens in new tab).
You aren’t getting horror deja vu – a prominent Japanese illustrator of horror has been attached to a project called Silent Hills before. The first one was Junji Ito, the creator of all kinds of mind-bending horror manga, back when he was meant to be part of a creative triumvirate along with Gullermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima. Sadly, that project fell by the wayside as Kojima split with Konami, and all that publicly remains of it is PT.
It’s sadly worth pointing out that the only official word we’ve heard from Konami about Silent Hills is to shut down the rumors (opens in new tab): “it’s not to say we are completely closing the door on the franchise, just not in the way it is being reported.” At least with the images shared by Maruo, we can feel fairly certain that something is afoot.
Even if the game series’ future is in question, we know at least one more Silent Hill movie is coming (opens in new tab).