Silent Hill, Fatal Frame Movie Scripts are Finished, Says Director

The scripts for the new Silent Hill and Fatal Frame movies have reportedly been finished, according to the director of the two films himself.

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Christophe Gans will be helming the two feature length films based on iconic horror game franchises of the 2000s. He revealed the status of the films' scripts in an interview with the French media outlet Jeux Video, reports GameRant. Gans, who also serves as screenwriter on the projects, said that he spent a good chunk of the pandemic lockdown working on the script for the third Silent Hill movie.

As for the Fatal Frame movie script, the director says it will be filmed after Silent Hill - though he didn't reveal anything else further. All in all, Gans says that the two scripts were written under Konami and Tecmo's watchful eyes, so maybe fans don't have to worry about any sweeping changes to the original lore.

Gans, however, made a very bold claim about the script for the Silent Hill movie. As reported by IGN, he says that the script for the film will be standalone and independent of the two previous releases. He also says that the film could come to theaters as early as next year.

Here's what Gans had to say about the script and the film in general:

I'm currently working on it; the script for a new Silent Hill move that is totally independent from the two previous movies made and respects the way Silent Hill has evolved. [Silent Hill] is a bit like Twilight Zone, the Fourth Dimension, a place where anything and everything can happen. I've worked on a new Silent Hill which is a Silent Hill of the year 2023... and not a Silent Hill as I imagined it in 2006.

To cap things off, Gans' work on the new Fatal Frame movie actually got its last update back in October before this one. As reported by GamerBraves, development of the film continues on outside of Japan, where the first adaptation was screened back in 2014. The film is produced by Samuel Hadida, whos production credits include the first two Silent Hill movies and the Resident Evil movies.

Low Expectations For The New Silent Hill And Fatal Frame Films

To say that the previous movies based on the two iconic horror game franchises didn't fare well is a massive understatement.

Starting things off with Silent Hill, there were two films that were released six years apart: one in 2006, and the sequel Silent Hill Revelation in 2012. The original film only grossed just over $100 million from a budget of $50 million, and received a very poor critic score on Metacritic. Perhaps the only redeeming quality in it is the favorable user score, which sits at 7.9 at the time of this writing.

The sequel, Revelation, grossed just over half that of the first film at $56 million from a budget of $20 million - basically making it a box office flop. As for the 2014 adaptation of Fatal Frame, it might have been slightly better-reviewed compared to the two Silent Hill films that came before it. Kotaku called in "an atmospheric masterpiece."

But others didn't think the same - on Rotten Tomatoes, the Japanese language adaptation has a paltry 55% audience score on less than 50 ratings. This could mean that not enough people saw it, but also means that those who did see it found it a little underwhelming.