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Be very afraid. Silent Hill is a game that, for me, reinvented the entire horror genre from the bottom up. This simple, pixelated little horror game scared the wits out of me far worse than any movie or game ever has. Silent Hill took a step back from normal horror techniques and actually put some thought into them.

For starters, the town you're in is engulfed in a perpetual fog that only lets you see about 30 yards ahead. While some may argue that this may have been, at the time, an attempt to heighten environment detail at the expense of viewing distance (Remember Turok?), it was actually used to heighten tension.

Sound is used extensively in the Silent Hill games to create a world dripping with creepy atmosphere. To compensate for your limited view distance, your character is equipped with a radio. The radio emits static when the town's otherworldly inhabitants approach and the static varies in pitch, variety, and volume depending on the number, types and range of approaching enemies. Not only does this serve the game mechanic, but it helped contribute to an atmosphere that kept you on edge one-hundred percent of the time.

The environments in the game were a major component to the scare factor as well. There were two different versions of the town of Silent Hill: one was a heavily fogged town where ash perpetually rained from the sky and the other was a hellish and extremely dark town full of bloody chainlink fences, broken wheelchairs, carved and gutted corpses and a creepy tornado siren that perpetually wailed in the background. To this day, tornado sirens still send shivers down my back because of that game.

The most impressive thing about the game was that, unlike the Resident Evil series and most horror films, the Silent Hill games contain NO cheap scares whatsoever. All of it's scare power is accomplished by whittling down the player's psychology with it's wide array of well used tools. The first time that I played it my psychology was whittled bare in about ninety minutes of play time.

If Yahoo!: Movies recently posted trailer is any indication, the Silent Hill movie is set to do the same thing for horror movies that it did for video games. In the games, Silent Hill (the town) used a very tried and true mechanic for luring it's victims into town and that seems to hold true for the movie. In other words, the plot is exactly like the games. The trailer will also demonstrate that the movie's cinematography is spot on the games. Moreover, the movie also features Sean Bean (National Treasure, The Lord of the Rings trilogy) on it's cast. Most impressive of all, however, is that the movie's principal creators, Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction)and Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of the Wolf), are self professed avid gamers and are obsessively devoted to delivering the game experience on film.

Click here to view the trailer.