Content warning: This essay mentions sexual assault, abortion, domestic violence, gun violence, suicide, and other triggering topics. Please do not continue if these themes distress you.
Kojima Productions’ Silent Hills, the canceled Silent Hill sequel only playable through its 2014 Playable Teaser (P.T.), earned a status as one of the greatest horror games of all time after its launch. Though Konami pulled it from the PlayStation store, its horror iconography — a skinless fetus wailing in a sink, a screaming refrigerator thrashing against the ceiling, and eye-gouged ghost in a bloodied dress — continues to receive praise to this day, with fans remaking the game or selling PlayStation 4 consoles with P.T. installed.
And personally, in my dabble with horror games, no other game has since rivaled P.T.’s ability to evoke such intense, lingering anxiety. And I wish we existed in a world in which praise would be my final word.
However, our world is one wracked with injustice — so, what I would consider a timeless relic shatters into an exemplar of the ritualistic vilification of victims of domestic violence. And what bleaker time to revisit the game than one year after Roe vs. Wade fell to the puritanical whims of evangelicals?
Before I get ahead of myself, a little on P.T. It’s a walking simulator that leads the player’s male avatar through a looping hallway that transforms from a mundane home to a deathly, haunted space. Every loop introduces uncanny elements, from a corridor of eyeballs to the moans of a sobbing woman (presumably, the ghost who stalks the premises). The player is unable to do much beyond walk around, “zoom” in to focus on parts of the house, and encounter the ghost and a fetus in the sink. With that, I spent my subsequent playthroughs seeking out the ghostly woman and listening to the diegetic noise surrounding her presence.
“Lisa” and the Monstrosity of Women Victims
Around the fifth loop, the player will catch a glimpse of a woman standing in the hallway. P.T. fans have dubbed her “Lisa,” based on a note on a wall that reads: “Forgive me, Lisa.” She vanishes soon after, then reappears randomly in mirrors, upstairs, or directly behind the player.
Her appearance is deeply wrong. She wears a high heel on one foot, the other bare. As proof of her mutilation, bile and blood soil her nightgown. Her expression is forever frozen in a grimace, and her eyes have been gouged out. But what struck me was her postpartum bump and her erratic movement, as if she suffers a perpetual seizure.
A diegetic radio announcement offers some context. After Sunday brunch, a father killed his pregnant wife and children. Police found him listening to the radio in his car. Turns out, he was the latest killer in a series of familicides: “There was another family shot to death in the same state last month, and in December last year, a man used a rifle and a meat cleaver to murder his entire family,” the broadcaster reports. “[It] could be part of a larger trend, such as employment, childcare, and other social issues facing the average family.”
In later loops, the radio repeats the message with a contradictory claim: “After killing his family, the father hung himself with a garden hose they had in the garage.” Moments after, a second voice warbles out another contradiction: “After killing his family, the father hung himself with an umbilical cord they had in the garage.”
The fetus in the sink, supposedly the source of the umbilical cord, talks to the player in an unsettlingly deep voice to explain the leadup to the husband’s breaking point. It suggests that the wife was sexually assaulted before her murder: To provide financially when her husband succumbed to alcoholism, she worked part-time at a grocery store. “Only reason she could earn a wage at all,” the fetus says, “is the manager liked the way she looked in a skirt.”
Lisa may not be the literal woman in the gruesome narrative. She could be an apparition symbolizing every dead mother in the report. However, allegorical or literal, the violence inflicted on her body is in line with a case of domestic violence that ended in a forced abortion and murder-suicide. An alcoholic, unemployed man, deeply enmeshed in toxic masculinity, resents his breadwinning wife, whose manager sexually assaults her. Blinded by rage and revenge, he executes a murder-suicide that results in the haunted house and its ghostly fetus and woman inhabitants. Unless I missed a gigantic context clue, the apparition of Lisa’s corpse, her stomach cavity, and the mountain of proof of abuse represents victims (85% of whom are women) of cruel men who would rather see them dead than not reliant on his “protection.”
The game, however, levies against Lisa her own body and demise — and therein lies my issue with P.T.
Hints scattered throughout the home attempt to hash out the reasons behind the husband’s evil. If anything, the game humanizes him more than it does Lisa. Police, according to the radio, blame larger social forces at work, such as unemployment. His alcoholism may have skewed his moral compass, the fetus claims. He had a mental health crisis, per neighbors who told reporters that he “was chanting some strange spell” days before the homicide. A handwritten “Forgive me, Lisa. There is a monster inside of me” suggests that he had begged his wife for help prior to his rampage. The radio also wonders if the tap water he drank was contaminated. All of that may be true. And we can indeed mourn his family’s fate as the consequence of societal failure.
Yet, it is not Lisa’s husband nor the terrors of sexual abuse that we most dread encountering. The horror comes from Lisa herself — a familiar victim-blaming caricature to villainize a woman for her male partner’s wrongdoings. We recoil at the sight of her twitching apparition. We shield our eyes when she rushes toward the player’s character at breakneck speed. In fact, the hallway itself parallels a birth canal: A claustrophobic, bloody, and traumatic event that pushes the player’s avatar through the mother’s agony and releases him into open air at the end of the game. Her abuse, brutal abortion, and death, in other words, are reduced to cheap shock-value, jump-scare horror.
And to state the obvious, it is Lisa who haunts the house, causing it to loop itself, entrapping the player, and corrupting the domestic sphere into an unfamiliar, violent space. She is portrayed as the home wrecker, literally corrupting the hallway in the gameplay, rather than the man who chose to actively tear apart his family due to his own narcissism. The man is vindicated; the woman is (again, literally) demonized.
This is not to defend Lisa as some kind of saint. In some interpretations, she had an affair with her manager to escape her husband (an arguably problematic analysis in itself, to inject my opinion). Her sobbing could be interpreted as hysterical laughter, and I use the word “hysterical” intentionally. She harms the player at one point, attacking and sending them back to the start of the game.
But domestic violence experts argue that reactive violence is an extremely common form of self-defense, in which the victim has reached “a breaking point” and protects oneself from a violent person or situation. I’m not excusing Lisa for assaulting the player’s avatar, but laying out the unfair expectation of perfection from women suffering abuse — an expectation that P.T. also engages with in Lisa’s antagonism. When women duck low, the abuse allegation is discredited. When a posthumous Lisa regains control over her body and weaponizes it against the male avatar, she is the evil bitch who deserves villainy.
Our Post-Roe Reality, One Year In
Apart from the jump-scares, though, I don’t believe Lisa reclaimed any more of her agency beyond that. She can’t leave her own house, eternally damned to tread its haunted loop. Though given a second, albeit fucked-up, chance at life, she can never avenge herself. Her screaming fetus, grimy dress, seizures, and eyeless face all serve as agonizing reminders of her demise. She is, I think, just as much a victim of the hallway as the player is.
Her allegorical entrapment brings me to the current moment in the United States, in which the Dobbs decision has effectively endorsed the bounty-hunting of people who seek abortions. Around one in five women have experienced contact sexual violence (e.g. rape, sexual coercion) by an intimate partner, according to the CDC. Abortion bans, experts warn, may exacerbate the situation and correspond with a rise in domestic violence during pregnancy. Reproductive coercion, a method in which abusers attempt to control their victim’s body, has already increased in states with anti-abortion governments, with either abusers raping their partner to force a pregnancy or beating them to induce miscarriages. And when a woman desperately tries to protect herself from state-sanctioned punishment, she is met with charges of murder.
Just last month, Gabriella Gonzalez, 26, was killed by her 22-year-old boyfriend Harold Thompson in a violent confrontation near a gas station in Dallas, Texas. Gonzalez’s sister witnessed her death.
Court records allege that Thompson was upset over an abortion his partner received in Colorado. According to police, the two argued before Thompson choked Gonzalez, then shot her in the head. Further interviews with the police reveal that Thompson had been “angry” with Gonzalez for wanting to leave him, and a May affidavit reveals that he had beaten Gonzalez during their relationship. He is now held in the Dallas County jail without bond.
To offer P.T. some credit, its gameplay does glimpse into this terror of domestic violence — after all, much like the real-life counterparts, toxic masculinity led Lisa’s partner to engage in murder. However, in its decision to center Lisa’s corpse as the antagonist, it more so sensationalizes the consequences of her torture than critically examines what abuse looks like. In light of the war on reproductive rights waged by incels, right-wing evangelicals, far-right extremists, and conservative politicians, this displacement of her husband’s villainy stings even sharper.
It’s important to note, though, that P.T. was produced by a Japanese company, and thereby any post-Roe analysis is translated cross-culturally. I’d argue, nevertheless, that the Silent Hill franchise was never one to flinch away from attempting to address reproductive rights. (Silent Hill 3, for one, contemplates women’s right to abort God.) Neither does this negate its relevance to the issue of spectacle, sexual violence, and hunting down of women victims, in which we all are arguably entangled in a patriarchal world. Nor the reality that American fanbases enthusiastically engage with international video games as cultural digests.
That alone is compelling enough for us to revisit and criticize Lisa’s monstrosity, lest we find ourselves imprisoned in a political death loop: doomed to relive, but never reimagine, the same atrocity time and time again.
