Silent Hill turns 25 today, and the weirdest thing about it is its connections to Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop
Playing the original Silent Hill for the first time back in 1999, many of its influences were immediately apparent: Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror movie Jacob’s Ladder and adaptation of Lolita; William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist 3; Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; the sci-fi and horror works of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman), and Dean Koontz.
It wasn’t until the following decade that hardcore Silent Hill fans uncovered the undeniable influence of Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy movie Kindergarten Cop on the design and architecture of the game. That may be the strangest revelation about Team Silent’s groundbreaking horror title, more so than any bizarre UFO or shiba inu-related secret ending in the franchise.
The biggest reference is with Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary School — which pulls its name from Village of the Damned. It’s directly based on the school from Kindergarten Cop, as the below video thoroughly illustrates. (In the movie, it’s called Astoria Elementary, but it’s a real-world grade school named John Jacob Astor Elementary.)
The Silent Hill development team turned to Kindergarten Cop, released in 1990, to give their game an authentic small-town American feel, from the yellow school busses to the posters that decorate the school hallways.
