(Credits: Far Out / Codyrt)
Sun 15 March 2026 0:30, UK
Plenty of horror movies have drawn inspiration from real-life events, but as far as influences go, a Pennsylvania fire that’s been burning nonstop since 1962 is definitely one of the strangest.
What makes it even stranger is that not only does the film have absolutely nothing to do with fire in the grand scheme of things, but it was an adaptation. Despite having pre-existing source material to draw on, the screenwriter’s obsession with a never-ending underground blaze took precedence.
To be fair, the vast majority of video game adaptations have been shite, so you can understand why anyone involved in one of them would try something different. The genre isn’t regarded for drawing in top-tier talent, either, but Academy Award-winning Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary was sufficiently won over by the pitch that he agreed to pen 2006’s Silent Hill.
Director Christophe Gans and producer Samuel Hadida approached Avary, and he understood the assignment, explaining that “when you’re going to film something, especially a game, you need to be ready to take everything apart, and then put it together in a new way.” That’s what he tried to do, and he looked to his childhood when in need of a creative spark.
When he was growing up, the writer’s father, a mining engineer, would regale him with tales of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which has been on fire for a very long time. While nobody knows for sure exactly how it started, a prevailing theory is that hot ash was dumped near a landfill adjacent to a mine entrance, which caught ablaze and ignited the coal mines underneath.
It’s been burning since at least May 27th, 1962, and it still hasn’t stopped. As you’d imagine, the borough is virtually a ghost town these days, dwindling from thousands of residents to a population of just five in 2020. What exactly does that have to do with a video game horror movie about a mother and daughter being trapped in a demonic dimension? Quite a lot, actually.
The titular town in Silent Hill is covered in a thick layer of smoke, and thanks to the underground fire that’s been raging for six decades, Centralia’s streets, roads, and general terrain have suffered cracks, fissures, ruptures, and sinkholes that have caused steam and smoke to billow, impacting the atmosphere.
There’s also the fact that it’s almost entirely abandoned, just like Silent Hill, if you exclude the creatures that call it home, of course. In fact, it was such an important reference point for the production that the picture’s working title was Centralia, with Avary using it as his go-to reference point outside of the games.
It wasn’t an especially good or entertaining genre flick, although it did earn over $100 million at the box office, but it’s not often you can say that a horror movie based on a video game was also inspired by a fire that hasn’t been put out since the early ’60s.