OK, I went over my usual one title by a few as you’ll soon read, but I actually started this as a very different article revolving around Konami’s Silent Hill HD Collection (before it slipped into delay mode). Still, what with Valentine’s Day coming up along with my usual visceral reaction to the holiday (Yuck!), I may as well be nice for a change and share some really strange candy with you.

Don’t say you weren’t warned, though…

Konami’s hugely popular horror game franchise, Silent Hill, has been a personal favorite of mine ever since I got a demo from their PR department not too long after E3 1998. At that time, I was working in an independent game shop that also was expanding into publishing reviews, articles and features on the site (and later in a magazine published by the store). When the game was finally released in January 1999, I had to review it overnight for the web site. After about 11 or so hours of playing and taking copious notes on everything from the major differences from the demo to pointing out the assorted cinematic and literary influences I saw, I wrote an exceedingly lengthy (and a wee bit too cerebral) review.  All of that hard word ended up being brutally chopped down to a mere three or four paragraphs, but a few years later after leaving the shop (and in between jobs), I reworked my original draft and posted it on GameFaqs.

While horror-themed games have been around for a while, pure psychological horror as a thematic element was somewhat new to console games at that time while movies have been using it for decades prior. As I’ve gone back to the Silent Hill series numerous times, I’ve seen a number of parallels between imagery in the series and the films on this list. Below the jump, I’m going to introduce (or reintroduce) you to some of these unsettling films with the hope that you seek them out and experience a bit of sheer fright for yourselves before or after you play (or replay) any of the games in the series…

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