Is Silent Hill Scary? The Verdict and the Whole Plot

Sharon says the town's name in her sleep

Rose Da Silva and her husband Christopher are worried about their adopted daughter Sharon, who sleepwalks and has nightmares about a place called Silent Hill. Silent Hill is in West Virginia, and its people left in the 1970s because of an enormous coal seam fire. Rose decides the answers are there, so she drives Sharon there. At a gas station, a police officer named Cybil Bennett gets suspicious of how Rose is acting. As they drive into town, a girl appears on the road, Rose swerves and crashes, and she blacks out. She wakes up in a town full of fog, and Sharon is gone.

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A town with two settings, both bad

Rose searches for Sharon and chases the girl she saw before the crash, who looks like Sharon. The town keeps switching into a nightmare version full of monsters, including a huge figure called the Red Pyramid. Cybil finds Rose and tries to arrest her, but every road out of town ends at a cliff, so they are stuck together. Rose learns about Alessa Gillespie, a girl whom the Brethren, the town's fanatical cult, put to the flames as a witch. Alessa's mother Dahlia wanders the streets, an outcast, wracked with guilt over what happened to her daughter. Meanwhile, in the real world, Christopher searches the same abandoned town with a policeman named Thomas Gucci and sees only a quiet ruin with no fog and no creatures. Gucci eventually admits he used to live there and pulled Alessa out of the fire.

The nurses get a ward to themselves

Rose meets the girl again and learns she is one piece of Alessa. When the town slides into its dark version, Rose, Cybil and a Brethren member named Anna head for an old church, and on the way the Red Pyramid grabs Anna and skins her alive, in the middle of the movie. The Brethren then steer Rose and Cybil to a hospital, saying the demon holding Sharon is in the basement. Their leader, Christabella, sees Sharon in Rose's locket, declares that Sharon looks just like Alessa, and calls both women witches. Cybil keeps the Brethren off while Rose goes down alone. In the basement she slips past a group of disfigured nurses and reaches Alessa's room, where a flashback explains everything. The town shunned Alessa, a cult leader had her burned, and the fire that followed split her in two. One half became a dark force that bends the town, and the other half became Sharon.

Christabella picks the wrong witch

The scene people dread comes near the end, in the church. Rose lets the dark half of Alessa into her body so she can get inside, but the Brethren have already captured Sharon. Christabella burns Cybil as a witch and prepares to do the same to Sharon. Rose calls her a murderer, and Christabella stabs her in the heart. That wound lets Alessa out, as a disfigured figure strapped to a hospital bed, and she tears Christabella and her followers apart with razor wire while Dahlia is spared. Afterward Rose gets Sharon out, and the two halves of Alessa join up inside Sharon's body.