SLITTERHEAD

Silent Hill and Siren’s director promises a completely new strain of action-horror

Developer Bokeh

Publisher TBA

Format PC, Consoles TBA

Origin Japan

Release 2023

Bokeh founder Keiichiro Toyama promised a theme of “everyday life being shaken” for the studio’s debut, and his team certainly achieved that with its reveal trailer. Amid the splashy gore and horrifying multi-limbed monsters – all bone, sinew and grasping, mantis-like forelegs – it’s the closing moments that arguably prove most disturbing. A long shot of a figure on a balcony garden in a rundown apartment block shows a figure in what appears to be an unusual hat. We zoom in closer and its face resembles an exotic flower; closer still and no, it’s actually a giant maw with large teeth and two writhing tongues flicking outward. Those fleshy ‘petals’ then slowly retract to form the smiling face of an ordinary middle-aged woman.

That chilling contrast between the mundane and the otherworldly is the kind of imagery with which Toyama, writer-director of the original Silent Hill and the Siren games, has long been associated. So what would he say is the secret to scaring people? “I think that death can be described as something that one would seem to feel far away from in everyday life, though it is inescapable,” he begins. “Oneself and the ultimate extraordinary ‘death’ being continuous stimulates imagination – this is a theme I consider importantly when creating a horror work.”