Despite Its Awful Critical Reception, RETURN TO SILENT HILL Director Wants to Make More; Says Fans Think "I’m Doing a Pretty Good Job”

Return to Silent Hill hasn’t exactly been embraced with open arms by critics, but that reception hasn’t shaken director Christophe Gans.

In fact, the filmmaker is already talking about heading back into the fog again, even as the latest adaptation struggles to win over audiences and reviewers.

This isn’t unfamiliar territory for Gans. Long before Return to Silent Hill, he brought Konami’s iconic horror franchise to the screen with 2006’s Silent Hill. Nearly two decades later, he returned with a loose adaptation of Silent Hill 2, hoping to reframe the series as something closer to art-house horror than a standard video game movie. And despite the backlash, he clearly believes there’s more worth exploring.

“If I have the opportunity, we’ll come back to Silent Hill once more,” Gans said in an interview with Variety. “I’m not looking at Silent Hill only as a great video game. I’m looking at it as a piece of modern art. It has something really edgy and experimental.

“I will adapt another chapter because there are some that are extremely good, something very different from the first film, and now Return to Silent Hill. I like this world, and I can see that plenty of people are thinking I’m doing a pretty good job.”

That confidence comes at an interesting time. Return to Silent Hill currently holds a rough 16% critics score and a 30% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, numbers that reflect just how divided viewers are on Gans’ latest take.

Even among fans of the franchise, reactions have been mixed, with many praising the atmosphere and creature concepts while criticizing the execution.

Still, Gans’ passion for the material hasn’t faded. He continues to frame Silent Hill as more than a game series, treating it as a strange, unsettling form of modern mythmaking. Whether studios and audiences are willing to follow him back into that nightmare again is another question entirely.

For now, Return to Silent Hill is playing exclusively in theaters, leaving fans to decide if they’re ready for yet another trip into the fog should Gans get his wish. I doubt we’ll get another Silent Hill movie after this one crashed and burned at the box office.