Silent Hill Forever
If you want a link to the download for this edit, send me a message either here or on the Fanedit.org forums. Requests in the comments here will be ignored.
Spoilers ahead for the original film and the edit.
Synopsis: After a near miss while driving, James Sunderland meets Mary Crane. When tragedy strikes, James finds himself trapped in the idyllic and nightmarish town of Silent Hill forever.
What’s changed: Now I generally liked Return to Silent Hill when it came out, and actually leaving the theater, I wasn’t even thinking of doing a fan edit. As an adaptation of Silent Hill 2 it was abysmal, but it had some decent ideas that worked within the framework of what was presented. But the way it was structured, especially toward the end, was a bit weird. And they pulled their punch with the ending as well, combining the “In Water” and “Leave”/“Maria” end as well as bringing in the loop theory. All well and good, but it led to an ending that tried to have its cake and eat it too.
So now, the movie opens with James’s narration from the end of the film before looping back to him meeting Mary. At the end, he wakes up on the hospital before going back to the scene of him meeting Mary. The idea is to show that James can, to a point, remember and try to move on but just can’t.
One of the more controversial additions to the film was “Mary Angela Laura Crane.” Basically, that all the characters James meets (besides Eddie) are all manifestations of Mary. I did cut out the reveal scene with the gravestone, but I did keep the idea in the film, it’s just not as obvious. The admissions paperwork to the hospital that James finds still shows “Mary A. L. Crane” and we still see Angela wearing the same floral dress that Mary wore. I also kept Angela telling James he could come find her later, as I wanted the manifestations of Mary to give him an “out” and let him know that it was okay to move on. But in classic guy fashion that clue goes right over his head.
All the flashbacks that were sprinkled into the film have been consolidated into a sequence at the start, and most of James having flashes of Mary and such throughout the film have been cut.
One of the biggest changes I made was the addition of what I call “rewind loops” a few times throughout the film. These happen in instances where James dies or should be dead: at the very start after the “In Water” voice over, another one in the apartments and in the hospital, and the last one at the end when James sees the young couple walking outside of the hospital.
I’ve also sprinkled in some “new” music here and there (but it’s all Silent Hill music) and made a lot of nips and tucks to the segment in the town itself. Even though the majority is a delusion, I tried to cut down dialogue and stuff that wouldn’t make sense in the moment, like Eddie asking James what he does and such.
Final runtime: 91 minutes.
Original runtime: 106 minutes.
File information:
1920x800 MP4 file, about 9.5gb in size. I normally do a larger file alongside a smaller one, but for this even at full quality the size wasn’t too much bigger than the free download limit so I just reduced the bitrate a bit.
English audio, 5.1 surround. Subtitles will be available at a later date.
Full list of changes and such will be included in the download link, but it’s not totally exhaustive: I had to make some trims and cuts here and there to accommodate moving flashbacks and I didn’t document everything.