Excluded: “Return to Silent Hill is not a sequel. It's a new film, with rules…”

Nearly 20 years after his first film Silent Hill, Christophe Gans returns to this horrific universe. Encounter.

The new issue of First has just arrived on newsstands, with Alexandre Astier on the cover. Among the 25 most anticipated films of 2025, there is obviously Kaamelott Second partand there is also Return to Silent Hillnew free adaptation of Konami's horrific video games by Christophe Gansalmost 20 years after his first film silent Hill.

For this new opus, he found Sandra Vo-Anh (who had worked alongside him on Beauty and the Beast), and William Josef Schneider (The Legend of Tembo). In casting, he hired Jeremy Irvine (Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, War Horse) and Hannah Emily Anderson (X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Jigsaw).

Here are its first images, accompanied by some thoughts from its director. To read our entire preview 2025 (First also met the teams of Mission: Impossible 8by Christopher McQuarrie, or even by The Shrinking Manby Jan Kounen), appointment on newsstands.

Excluded – Jan Kounen presents his version of The Shrinking Man (2025), with Jean Dujardin

A man receives a letter from his late wife to join her in a city-purgatory haunted by monsters: this is how the new film by Christophe Gans begins.

The death of producer Samuel Hadida in 2018 marked the end of his comic book adaptation project for Christophe Gans. Corto Maltese. What to do? The director (whose last film Beauty and the Beast dates from 2014) left in 2020 for a sequel to silent Hillhis best known film internationally. “I see influences from silent Hill everywhere: the scene with the nurses was sometimes reshot shot by shot! In The Nun, I am a legendOr Army of the Dead…But it’s quite flattering, isn’t it?”

Return to Silent Hill is the adaptation of the horror video game Silent Hill 2released in 2001 and considered (rightly) as the masterpiece of the franchise, and a masterpiece at all: a remake was also released last October while fans are crying for the ghost of Silent Hillsa game directed by Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima and canceled in 2015. We always come back to it. “Silent Hill 2it's perhaps the most nerve-wracking experience ever offered by a video game.”explains Gans, who cites The Tenant by Roman Polanski as the main reference (“One of my biggest cinema traumas!”), like the creators of the game.

Return to silent Hill will be released nineteen years later silent Hill : “The time gap between the two films was necessary. Return to Silent Hill is not a sequel. It's a new movie, with rules, like Silent Hill 2 “betrayed” Silent Hill. The second game established that this universe did not exist except in the character's head. We move from a parallel universe to the subjective vision of the hero. THE male gauze is the deep essence of Silent Hill 2… Either I stupidly remade the first film, or I took advantage of this time to have a different experience. I too have changed. I am no longer the same. The first film, I saw it as a horror opera, very large, with large sets, crane movements… There, there are a lot of drones, handheld cameras, even for shots that could have been do with rails. The result is very, very different.”

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