I’ll never get over Kindergarten Cop’s influence on Silent Hill

polygon.com:

Playing the original Silent Hill for the first time back in 1999, many of its influences were immediately apparent: Adrian Lyne’s psychological horror movie Jacob’s Ladder and adaptation of Lolita; William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist 3; Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining; the sci-fi and horror works of Ray Bradbury, Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman), and Dean Koontz.

It wasn’t until the following decade that hardcore Silent Hill fans uncovered the undeniable influence of Ivan Reitman and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s comedy movie Kindergarten Cop on the design and architecture of the game. That may be the strangest revelation about Team Silent’s groundbreaking horror title, more so than any bizarre UFO or shiba inu-related secret ending in the franchise.

The biggest reference is with Silent Hill’s Midwich Elementary School — which pulls its name from Village of the Damned. It’s directly based on the school from Kindergarten Cop, as the below video thoroughly illustrates. (In the movie, it’s called Astoria Elementary, but it’s a real-world grade school named John Jacob Astor Elementary.)

The Silent Hill development team turned to Kindergarten Cop, released in 1990, to give their game an authentic small-town American feel, from the yellow school busses to the posters that decorate the school hallways. Some argue the influences go deeper, like that Silent Hill’s protagonist Harry Mason is dressed similarly enough to Schwarzenegger’s John Kimble. Both are stories about missing children, and both happily end with the male lead becoming a new father figure.

I choose to believe another truth. Someone on the team just really likes Kindergarten Cop, a very strange and tonally chaotic movie, and wanted to give Reitman’s highest-rated Schwarzenegger vehicle (above Junior and Twins) its due props.

Silent Hill is, after all, a love letter to the team’s influences. The in-game map is filled with streets named after genre writers like James Ellroy, Carl Sagan, Robert Bloch, Michael