Is the cult still operating?

[Shadedarkan]

REVEAL SPOILER

It could be. The way they situated the eye in the top of the triangle reminded me more of the pyramid with the 'all seeing eye' from the back of a dollar bill. It could be a fusion of the Seal and Halo too though.

[poorjack]

REVEAL SPOILER

That is initially what I thought as well, but the eye in the pyramid doesnt have any business being in Silent Hill. I would say half Seal and half Halo is more likely.

[Purramid_Head]

REVEAL SPOILER

nah. The eye resembles the eye of night tarot, the one that represents God. It's seen in Silent Hill 3.

[poorjack]

Xu brings up a good point

[Shadedarkan]

The eye in the Halo and the eye in the tarot are the same, so it really doesn't make a difference. They both represent the same thing.

[poorjack]

Whether it is the eye from the halo, or the seal of metatron is aside the point. Either way, it is Order paraphernalia. The cult must be alive and kicking.

[Heather'sLadder]

I want to ask you about the meaning of the scene in SH3 that Ito talked about when Valtiel covers Alessa's face after Claudia gives birth to God, I always thought that it meant that Alessa died forever and there won't be any reincarnations like Cheryl and Heather to give birth to God anymore, therefore, no more cult. I know that the cult is gone but the spirit of it is still operating, but I think that there won't be anymore "God Birth" stuff because Alessa is the only incubator we've ever known. Maybe the new believers will find some new incubators like Walter someway or another and the cycle will begin again, but I refuse to believe that the cult is still operating and that there will be a new SH story similar to the old ones not only because Alessa is dead but simply because Team Silent wanted SH4 to be the end of the series.

[NarooN]

Team Silent wanted SH4 to be the last one? That's news to me.

The cult doesn't necessarily need to have one arbitrary goal. They could be easily brought back with some new objective of doom, but I doubt we'll be seeing anymore cult games for some time since most of the fanbase seems to be bored of that plot style.

[schlaufuchsMIKE]

Oh God, I've hated the cult plot from the start. The more ambiguous the back story is, the better. Things that can't be understood are frightening. It's the reason Resident Evil 1 was the only RE to ever scare me - because they gave an explanation for everything, and it ruined the horror of it. Although, the cult was really good for Walter's back story, I will give it that.

[NarooN]

I think even with the cult, you couldn't explain everything that goes on and what went on in the past. I'd like to believe that the cult themselves don't know everything. As later games in the series proved, the cult doesn't even need to really be present nor do anything for the weird things to happen.

[Devoured]

Y'know in the history that we know of only 2 people have tried birthing a god and Claudia's attempt is directly linked to Dahlia's. There's Walter but it's not what he intended to do, and it wasn't the cult's intention either. So birthing the god to bring forth paradise yadayada doesn't even appear to be the cults' objective, I think they simply never had an objective in that sense to begin with. They just live their lives and go to church like any good ole christian American...Homecoming changed this of course with an army of cultists working for an out-of-towner so evil can prevail for whatever reason but in general I don't think it's even a major aspect of Silent Hill's religion at all. I know their religion is largely based on the concept but to actually go out and do that sort of immanentizing the eschaton thing is something else altogether, there have just been some extremists that do read that far into the text and actually went and did it.

IMO it would be silly to deny that aspect of the town, it is very defining, but I'm glad not every damn game involves you playing through it, knowing you have to try and avoid the birth of a disfigured 'God' only to find it was inevitable to begin with and realize you're gonna have to look through your wallet for that red winegum you found in your dead mother's [who turns out to be Heather] musicbox 8 hours before that.

4 didn't even really feel that much like a cult game to me like 3 and [the cult parts of] 0rigins did, it was there but I guess it's mostly that you're not constantly running into barefeet ladies telling us about the end and the beginning and whatnot. Walter is pretty much the only cult connection and he's too busy trying to look like a pedophile to bark much scripture at Henry...

[Floodclaw]

Homecoming changed this of course with an army of cultists working for an out-of-towner so evil can prevail for whatever reason but in general I don't think it's even a major aspect of Silent Hill's religion at all.

Just wanted to pop in and say that it seems like the whole point of the cult in Homecoming went right over your head. [Homecoming spoilers, obviously] The cultists (four main families) in Shepherd's Glen sacrificed to the old gods as part of a pact. Since they moved away from Silent Hill and defied the Order, they made the pact so that the gods wouldn't wreak vengeance upon them. Hence the sacrifices to appease them. Who's the 'out-of-towner'? Evil prevailing? What? They're just trying to appease the gods after the pact was broken since Alex accidentally a whole Joshua. Of course it's not a major aspect of Silent Hill's religion because it's an offshoot. They're not the same religion anymore. It's like trying to call a Westboro Baptist Christian the same thing as a Fundamentalist Christian. [/rant]

[schlaufuchsMIKE]

I hate to contradict myself, but for as much as I dislike the cult aspect, I actually thought it really worked for Silent Hill 4. You take wild fantasies from over-saturated zealots and mix them with a socially under-stimulated child with a void to fill in his psyche, and you get a powder keg.

Of course, now that I've thought about it more, I suppose that's kind of the idea with Alessa.

[Devoured]

Homecoming changed this of course with an army of cultists working for an out-of-towner so evil can prevail for whatever reason but in general I don't think it's even a major aspect of Silent Hill's religion at all.

Just wanted to pop in and say that it seems like the whole point of the cult in Homecoming went right over your head. [Homecoming spoilers, obviously] The cultists (four main families) in Shepherd's Glen sacrificed to the old gods as part of a pact. Since they moved away from Silent Hill and defied the Order, they made the pact so that the gods wouldn't wreak vengeance upon them. Hence the sacrifices to appease them. Who's the 'out-of-towner'? Evil prevailing? What? They're just trying to appease the gods after the pact was broken since Alex accidentally a whole Joshua. Of course it's not a major aspect of Silent Hill's religion because it's an offshoot. They're not the same religion anymore. It's like trying to call a Westboro Baptist Christian the same thing as a Fundamentalist Christian. [/rant]

The cultists Alex fights in Homecoming are from Silent Hill, not Shepherd's Glen, give or take a few stowaways. So Holloway is an out-of-towner to them, regardless of the fact that her great-grandparents did come from SH 200 years ago. A few years have passed since the failed ritual and the events in Homecoming but no real explanation whatsoever is ever given as to why evidently a large number of Silent Hill's inhabitants would want to blindly follow Holloway with risk of own life to save a few wayward souls. Shepherd's Glen's mess is Shepherd's Glen's mess and unless she's got some hell of an incentive it's rather far-fetched to believe it was her zombie-like charm that won all their hearts.

There isn't anything to indicate that the ritual failing had much of a result at all aside from some clocks stopping and some freak root growth. The only people that went missing initially were the dead children, Holloway said people started moving out and by the end of the game it's evident the cult kidnapped most of the others. The monsters only started appearing in the months leading up to the events of Homecoming, so if anything Holloway is responsible for SG's ghost town state and Alex's failing to die has little to do with it. Holloway's actions are purely self-serving and have nothing to do with doing the right thing or trying to right a wrong, she's simply an enormous bitch that's trying to impose her twisted will on everyone else, killing off the infidels, including her own daughter. That has nothing to do with appeasing Gods.

As for 'the major aspect' of the religion, I was talking about burning little girls in order to birth Gods as well as basically the whole town going on witchhunts. In earlier games Dahlia and her cohorts and later Claudia were extremists even within the cult, which throughout the series has only been made up of a small fraction of the town's population to begin with. In Homecoming this group of extremists prepared to kill anything in its path is suddenly blown up to a small army of people that seem to be in it just for the bloodshed, despite having no business even caring about it in the first place.

[Floodclaw]

^I thought the cultists in Homecoming were the adults in the town that 'went missing', when they really allied with Holloway. The ritual has the effect it does because Holloway believes it does. The Otherworld saturates the town because the families think that that is what is going to happen, so it does. I figured the whole 'moving out' was just her lying to Alex to cover it up. She and the others believe that the gods are angry, so thus they are. They believe the Otherworld is their punishment and they're trying to set it right. I'm bad with wording my theories, is this making sense?

[Heather'sLadder]

The plot of the cult (Alessa, Cheryl, Heather) was awesome, but I think it's over now. It's done, and there is no point in repeating and exploiting it. I would like to see other plots and schemes made by the culists to achieve other different purposes in the series, or other stuff like the manifestation of illusions in SH2. I don't think the rest of the series will be as awesome as the past games (1,2,3,4).

[WhiteClaudia]

REVEAL SPOILER

According to Ito, the very end of Silent Hill 3, when Heather quickly turns to look back at the camera as if something as appeared, he confirmed that it was supposed to be a baby there. Originally, they were going to include a baby's cry to hint at it, but then later took it out of the game, but it is indeed canon. Despite the possibilities of the cult itself dwindling in numbers, I think THIS might change things up? I don't know though, with that team no longer working on Silent Hill. Unless these new guys decide to work on that.

[Heather'sLadder]

@whiteclaudia
Yes, I know. I've read that posted topic. But I was only asking because Ito never really gave any answers about the meaning of the Valtiel and Alessa scene, and he let us interpret it. The scene seemed important enough, so I assumed it meant that ALESSA died and she won't be an incubator anymore, but maybe GOD will still be alive and will still be summoned somehow. But I remember reading and interview with Yamaoka and Tsuboyama and they were talking about SH4 and the stuff that inspired them for the making of the game, like Coin Locker Babies and other things, and - correct me if I'm wrong - I think they said that the Team will be disbanded and they won't be making anymore Silent Hill games, but they will let other people do, and that's why the games after SH4 won't be original anymore. This is sad because I didn't like Homecoming and I didn't even wanted to bother playing Downpour and watched some of it. Origins was OK, I guess, but still. That's just what I was saying, really.

[Purramid_Head]

Ito think it ended with 3.

[Heather'sLadder]

@Purramid-Head
Yes, I know. That's what I said earlier when I was talking about Ito and the scene, and later I said that the end of the "series" came with the separation of "Team Silent".