As if we didn’t have enough to deal with between despotic regimes, habitat collapse, and dodgy new technologies, Konami are on a mission to turn everywhere into Silent Hill. The recent Silent Hill f took place in a fictional Japanese town from the 1960s. The forthcoming Silent Hill: Townfall unfolds in Scotland. Konami have recently made ominous noises about taking the series to Central or South America.

The implication is that Silent Hill is a transferable metaphor, glomming onto unsuspecting nowherevilles worldwide. Well you can keep your filthy free association, Konami. A line has to be drawn. A line will be drawn here. Please find below a list of places that would never, ever turn out to be Silent Hill.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Copenhagen, Denmark.”

Copenhagen is the statistically determined happiest city in the statistically determined happiest country in the world. It’s got gorgeous green spaces, a high median salary, excellent sanitation, good metro services, and a flourishing network of bike lanes. It has a great cultural scene, too. Why not stop by Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and check out their collection of Rodins? Why not visit the Cisternerne museum, where stalactites hang among the artworks, or the Nationalmuseet, where you can read about the plague outbreak and devastating fires of the 18th century, which all but wiped the city’s medieval architecture from the map. Also the German occupation and the RAF bombings. Let’s not go to Copenhagen. I think I can hear sirens in the distance.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Çatalhöyük (7500 BC).”

That last entry was a test, actually, designed to illustrate a fundamental problem. Silent Hill can be anywhere because Silent Hill channels real-life historical iniquity. Fortunately, this suggests another kind of numerical solution. Originally built in what is now Turkey, Çatalhöyük may be the earliest recorded human city and as such, has the quantitively smallest amount of history to call upon. Checkmate, Konami! What are you going to do, make a game about the beauty and awfulness of a primordial universe that has never known the architect’s pencil, the bricklayer’s hand? Har! I’d like to see that. I’d like to see that.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Portmeirion, Wales.”

Portmeirion isn’t just a very pleasant Welsh town, it’s a very pleasant Welsh folly. No, not like Tom Jones. It’s a fake village constructed to preserve various architectural styles and bamboozle tourists with a selection of colourfully crammed-together, Italianate buildings. It’s kind of like an Uncharted game with all the different levels superimposed, or a confusingly gelato-powered adaptation of Paradise Killer. There is a lighthouse and a hotel and a massive open air chess set and some ornamental lakes and a statue of Hercules. You might consider the bricolage horrifying, I guess. I find it diverting and silly.

Come now! Shake off your qualms. George Harrison spent his 50th birthday in Portmeirion, and the lead guitarist of the Beatles would never lead us into any kind of wacky metaphysical predicament. True, Portmeirion is where they filmed The Prisoner, a Kafkaesque 60s TV show about nameless people stuck in a sealed-off coastal town, but it also has a jam shop. Silent Hill would never have a jam shop. Say this out loud to yourself: “This town is full of monsters! How can you sit there and eat jam?” It doesn’t work, does it.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Northlandz, New Jersey.”

Nestled not far from the banks of the Raritan in the Watchung Mountains, Northlandz is the “world’s largest miniature wonderland”. It’s a model town, in other words. The key thing about model towns is that you are much bigger than they are, and so, there is nothing within them that can threaten you. Is Godzilla afraid of normal-sized towns? No, he is not. He tramples them as he pleases, laughing and spraying chunks of freeze-dried giftshop marshmallow. Do not actually do this to Northlandz. The manager will ask you to leave.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Artemis, The Moon.”

NASA’s Artemis base has two distinct advantages among towns at moderate risk of becoming Silent Hill. Firstly, it doesn’t actually exist yet. Secondly, it will be a town on the Moon. This automatically thwarts a number of Silent Hill’s favourite environmental and atmospheric motifs. Sirens? Can’t hear sirens in space, my love. Mysterious black mold and other growths? Fool! Ain’t no flora on the Moon, though NASA do plan to set up mushroom houses, and I guess there’s whatever bacteria yet lingers in the bags of shit left behind by the Apollo astronauts.

Rust? Nay sirrah, you do but jest – oh, now that I investigate, it turns out the whole Moon is rusting. Oxygen particles have been slowly making their way over from Earth, riding the “tail” of our magnetosphere, reacting with metals and moisture on the surface to form hematite. The Moon, it appears, is undergoing a very slow Otherworld transformation. Let us proceed swiftly on to….

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill. Fortunately, I happen to be a remarkably well-adjusted person, with no baggage to speak of.”

Famously, the trick to Silent Hill is all the trauma you bring in with you. It’s this that gives form to the munsters and causes the masonry to get all up in your grill. By logical extension, the trick to not ending up in Silent Hill is not to have any trauma. So all we need to do is ensure that everybody who visits anywhere that could potentially be Silent Hill has lived their whole life in a safe, nourishing, sociable, and well-resourced environment, steeped in values of compassion and mutual thriving, free from prejudice and violence.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Nesfield, England.”

Sometimes it’s best to stick to what you know. Nesfield is the small hamlet on the border of West and North Yorkshire where I grew up. I had a happy early childhood, myself. We kept chickens for their eggs, spent the summer afternoons stealing golf balls from the course down the road, and swam in the River Wharfe, which wasn’t quite as full of sewage back then.

I still walk up there now and then to enjoy the quiet of the village green, with its carefully preserved pillory. I follow the path down past my childhood home to the watering well embedded in the wall at the bottom, with its barred portal. Then I stray into what we used to call the Wishing Tree Wood, with its canted trunks wrapped in brambles, some of which are actually old farm machines.

There is nothing eerie about any of this, I promise you. My scariest memory of Nesfield is of being chased by the poodle from the house next door. Pyramid Head had nothing on that poodle.