The Horror-Survival franchise, Silent Hill, has not come out with a game since the experimental “playable teaser” developed by the studio and Guillermo Del Toro was released in 2014. But there has recently been some news that a trailer for a new game is on its way.
While players won’t know exactly what that will entail, they can guarantee that the bosses in the game are going to continue the lineage of being some of the scariest in gaming. With 13 games in the series, there is no shortage of terrifying monsters to battle.
Incubus
The Incubus is the final boss battled in Silent Hill, depending on which ending the player decides to choose. And the reveal is almost as scary as the monster itself. The boss begins the event by violently emerging from a main character’s back before beginning its rampage.
The design of Incubus is heavily based on the Christian demon, Baphomet, with the body of a man and the head of a goat. The only difference from that imagery is that this monster does not have eyes. Creating a distinctly alien effect when battling him.
Mama
Introduced in the rail style, Silent Hill: The Arcade, Mama makes a brief but unforgettable appearance as one of the game’s bosses. Looking like a cross between a mannequin and a spider, the boss is a fearsome opponent.
Mama crawls around unnervingly quickly on thin, extended arms and legs. And her unmoving porcelain doll-like face is hung open in a never ending scream. What’s worse, the boss looks like the two main characters, adding a layer of psychological horror to the battle.
Sepulcher
Sepulcher sets the tone early for Silent Hill: Homecoming, becoming the first boss players face. As a manifestation of an antagonist’s guilt for killing his own son, it’s no wonder the art directors decided to make the monster as gruesome as possible.
This boss character is fought upside down and extends from the ceiling. From the waist up, it resembles a giant, faceless corpse with bloated hands that tries to reach for the player. The body goes down to a bloated, decayed tree trunk with tinier corpses embedded. A gruesome site that also hints to how the son was ultimately killed.
Phantom
As the disappointing final boss of Silent Hill: The Arcade, what the Phantom lacks in attractive playability, it makes up for by being appropriately terrifying. The creature is a pale blue color just like the drowned girl it is supposed to be representing.
Further, the creature is only a giant head, extending from the water and it opens its mouth in a wide grin to show knife-like teeth. The boss ends up looking like a deep sea fish. Its scary appearance is only intensified when a giant arm emerges from the creature’s jaw to lunge at the player.
Missionary
Like its moniker, the Missionary from Silent Hill 3 also works for a religious organization. This boss character is a mindless tool of the real antagonists of the game and what makes this enemy in particular so terrifying is that it is one of the few human monsters in the games.
The Missionary is dressed like a bloody surgeon with a burlap sack over its head and a noose around its neck. But upon close inspection, it is possible to see the lower half of a human’s face underneath the sack. Meaning that this monstrous creature is actually a human, twisted and tortured by the villains of the game.
Pyramid Head
Probably one of the most iconic and hardest bosses of the Silent Hill series, Pyramid Head, is symbolic of the series as a whole. And as the unofficial mascot of the games, the monster is appropriately terrifying.
As his name suggests, instead of any kind of human head atop the creature, there is instead an eyeless pyramid. The boss is shirtless and only clothed in a long white cloth around its midsection. Pyramid Head carries around a giant blade that skillfully uses in some of the more gory cutscenes of the games.
Asphyxia
Silent Hill: Homecoming has many bosses who are representations of the guilt felt by parents who had hands in the death of their children and Asphyxia is a particularly gruesome depiction. The child that gave rise to this monster was killed by suffocation, hence the name.
Along with the name, the creature itself has many allusions to suffocation, most obviously, the way to kill the boss is to remove the hands covering its mouth. But if that isn’t disturbing enough, Asphyxia is made up of even more sets of arms that are linked together forming a grotesque kind of centipede, crawling around on its hands.
Scarlet
The introduction of Scarlet is a horror classic, the creepy doll. Players watch the doll drop into a pool of blood where it immediately begins to elongate into a towering monstrosity with a staring porcelain face.
And in the second phase of the fight, the doll head cracks right along both sides of the mouth. This injury results in Scarlet’s mouth opening terrifyingly wide to reveal rows of needle-like teeth. What’s worse, in this stage, the broken, stretched-out doll begins crawling around like a spider after the player.
Abstract Daddy
If the name isn’t unsettling enough, the creature design of Abstract Daddy is another example of how weird the monsters for Silent Hill can get. Like many of the monsters in the series, this one has a strange eroticism that adds to the terror.
This boss design is difficult to understand at first glance and may just appear as a mound of bed linens. But upon closer inspection, Abstract Daddy is discovered to be to bodies crushed together and stitched to a bed in a clear reference to the themes of childhood trauma present throughout Silent Hill 2.
Momma
This boss fight has a special resonance with the protagonist of Silent Hill: Origins who encounters Momma, which is a manifestation of his own mother. Her disfigured visage is a reference to the real mother’s life in an insane asylum.
Momma is a blind woman wrapped up in cloth and suspended in a steel cage covered in dirt and grime. Most horrifyingly, Momma’s mouth is forced open by wires making it look like the monster is eternally screaming.
