Guillermo del Toro talks about working with Junji Ito and Kojima on Silent Hills

I’d love to go to karaoke with del Toro

Silent Hills being cancelled was bad enough for some, but I reckon the constant dribble of information about what could’ve been seeping out in the months following it has to be even worse.

Now here’s a little bit more of that dribble for you, because Guillermo del Toro has gone into more detail about how manga artist Junji Ito, Kojima, and he worked together on the cancelled game in an interview with IGN.

There’s a lot of talk about karaoke and of how shy Ito was, and del Toro shows a true understanding of what makes Ito’s work so good. It’s really fascinating to listen to, even if Silent Hills isn’t happening, purely because of his understanding of the horror manga genre. 

Then del Toro also gave some hints about what he and Ito had in mind with the way the horror in the game would’ve gone. He said they wanted to:

[Use] the next generation console in a way that would really surprise people. We said ‘let’s really freak out people, let’s really cause a panic with Silent Hills. Let’s go for it: full-blown social madness.

What that means is anyone’s guess. Considering Kojima was involved, it makes sense if they were going for some Psycho Mantis levels of meta-fuckery using the consoles themselves, and maybe even using the social aspects of the platforms? With someone like Junji Ito on board, it can get more difficult to predict what would’ve come of this other than it would’ve been very, very exciting.

Unfortunately, when asked about whether he was working with Kojima on anything new following Silent Hills (as everyone ever is hoping he does), del Toro seemed less enthusiastic. It mirrors his previous sentiments that he is done with games:

Whatever it is, work or not, I consider Kojima a master, and I have the good fortune of having some sort of friendship and relationship. For me, the interest is with interacting with like-minded people, whether it’s on Twitter or in real life. The fact he can show me stuff he’s working on and I can show him stuff I’m working on… it’s enough.

Silent Hills really feels like del Toro’s white whale. Hopefully he will rise up and do a Kickstarter or something somewhere down the line, but for now it seems like all we’ll be getting are the tiny little morsels he throws to us.