The best Silent Hill movie is the underrated '90s horror that originally inspired the games, and it's now back in theaters with a terrifying new restoration

By most standards – critical reception, Metacritic scores, becoming a witness with your own two eyes – there's never been a good Silent Hill film adaptation. Maybe it's that the anxiety of Konami's 1999 survival horror series is too lived-in to translate to a more passive, movie theater popcorn experience, or maybe it's because none of them can replicate the singularity of the film that inspired Silent Hill in the first place, Fatal Attraction director Adrian Lyne's 1990 horror movie Jacob's Ladder.

I'm inclined to believe the latter. With its new 4K restoration and theatrical re-release in the US, it's clear to me that the phantasmagorical paranoia of Jacob's Ladder remains at the heart of Silent Hill, even after decades of franchise flops and reinvention – and future Silent Hill installments, including the next scheduled Silent Hill movie, better not forget it.

It's good timing for Jacob's Ladder to return, opening at New York City's IFC Center on October 3 before rolling out nationally. Developer Konami just released its first original Silent Hill game in over a decade, Silent Hill f, on September 25, leaving the survival horror series' recognizable, gas station coffee Americana in the '90s and creating a nightmare version of '60s Japan. The (I think) powerfully provocative Silent Hill f yanks the franchise back from the cliff of icky slot machine and spin-off games that have marred it for years. It instead returns to the themes of Jacob's Ladder.

Recurring nightmares

The movie's protagonist Jacob Singer – much like infamous Silent Hill 2's James Sunderland – has what his wife, in a dream, calls "guilty thoughts." (Spoilers to follow.) The end of Jacob's Ladder reveals Vietnam soldier Jacob has been dying for the entirety of the film's runtime, having been viciously impaled by his brother soldier after being subjected to aggressive military drugs. But before this revelation, Jacob is in Hell.

Hell, it turns out, is New York City – which, by virtue of being an American dive bar epicenter, is also Silent Hill. Watching Jacob's Ladder after playing and replaying many of the games, obsessing over their aesthetics and preoccupation with monsters as a manifestation of guilt, guilt as a symptom of unhappiness, I'm floored by how many ideas Konami's franchise outright steals – to impressive effect.

Borrowed time

As Jacob lies under a painfully bright fluorescent lamp, dying in a makeshift medical bay in the jungle, he imagines he's alive in a million twisted ways. He sees himself living in Brooklyn with a woman who isn't his wife, literally named Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña), a mirror of Silent Hill 2's wild mistress Maria, who taunts James throughout his quest to find his sick missing wife Mary. Often, Jacob struggles to remember how to get home, at one point abandoning an almost empty subway car – there's a woman in it who won't speak to him, and a man with what looks like a skinless sausage for a penis – to find the Bergen St. station. He walks along the tracks, through puddles of rats and who-knows-what, to get there, only to discover the once again empty station has its exits blocked off with a metal gate; this entire scene, including the defaced subway station itself and its layout, was impeccably reproduced in 2003's Silent Hill 3.

But even this isn't as impressive as the hospital scene. 2001's Silent Hill 2 is something of a medical drama, with Brookhaven Hospital being one of its most memorable locations. Sludge practically oozes out of its once-white walls. Bubble Head Nurses bound in bloody push-up bras shamble through its halls, adding another layer of sick fascination to the scenario Jacob's Ladder lays out originally: thinking he just hurt his back, Jacob is strapped to a gurney, which doctors wheel from a pristine hospital wing through a hallway that looks as if it had been totally eaten by mold and a psych ward stained with blood. The wheels of the gurney knock into severed arms and other hunks of meat. A man with no legs and a bag over his head whips his face back and forth until it's a blur, another image Silent Hill 3 borrows from Jacob's Ladder for its eyeless monster Valtiel.

Born again franchise

The new Silent Hill f doesn't have as many of these copy-and-paste moments from Jacob's Ladder, by virtue of being set in a completely different place, at a completely different time. It has its own distinct visual identity – protagonist Hinako in her traditional school girl outfit, which gets more tattered and gory the longer you play, and all the red spider lilies spreading like hives on the earth. Still, Silent Hill f is a game about death, not knowing how it applies to you, not understanding where – in your zombie state – home is.

It continues Silent Hill's 26-year relationship with Jacob's Ladder in this thematic way. Now, I hope that director Christophe Gans is similarly called to Silent Hill tradition while creating his upcoming Silent Hill 2 film adaptation. Gans also directed the infamous 2006 Silent Hill movie of the same name, telling IGN that year that his movie leaves out any suggestion of Jacob's Ladder, since Silent Hill the game "exists by itself and without any obvious reference."

But I think references to the familiar are what makes Silent Hill palpable, like it could be right behind the next sheet of fog you see. Whether it's through a reference to small town, USA, Japanese folklore, or Jacob's Ladder, Silent Hill games make reality feel like mystery. As a great horror film, Jacob's Ladder does the same.

The 4K re-release of Jacob's Ladder begins on October 3 in US theaters. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.