There is a fight boiling over in Silent Hill – not for love, lust, nor the pendulous future of your sinner’s soul, but over pop legend Madonna and how much she influenced the horror franchise’s 2001 sequel. Silent Hill 2 artist art director is adamant the answer is barely at all.
A popular Twitter post says facetiously that Madonna’s music video for 1998 anthem ‘Nothing Really Matters’ was “inspiration for the atmosphere of silent hill 2 so technically we have madonna to thank for the perfection that is silent hill 2.” They’re referencing a deleted post Ito made in 2019 naming the ‘Nothing Really Matters’ video as one of his influences while curating Silent Hill 2’s rotten mood. But the horror artist says he’s been misunderstood.
“I said I inspired by Madonna’s Nothing Really Matters video,” Ito writes in a May 21 Twitter post, “but I meant the Butoh-like dances by Asian dancers painted entirely white in the video, not herself/her song.” Butoh is a beautiful, nauseating form of Japanese dance theater defined by sharp and labored movements. Artists of all kinds have used its tender-to-touch action as inspiration for their own vulnerable horror – the blurry ghosts of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Pulse, for example, twist into Butoh-like configurations before inspiring victims to kill themselves immediately. Guillermo del Toro also had actor Jacob Elordi learn Butoh in order to become the miserable Creature in 2025’s Frankenstein.
![Madonna - Nothing Really Matters (Official Video) [HD] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/cAVx9RKaLPU/maxresdefault.jpg)
Watch On
In Madonna’s music video, background dancers wear all-white shiver and moan in a Butoh style while the singer pulsates in red, dancing against Silent Hillish rust-stained hallways (“Just a coincidence,” according to Ito). Nonetheless, the video was simply “1 of inspirations for the Lying Figure, BHNurse’s etc [animations],” Ito says about Silent Hill 2’s armless sacks of skin and nasty Bubble Head nurse enemies, who both approach you while trembling like flies. “That’s all. Plz don’t jump to conclusions.”
He’s warned fans of this before, clarifying in 2024 he was inspired “NOT from the song BUT from the video.” He’s very insistent, and he does not like Madonna.
But the subset of horror fans who happen to also love Madonna – personally, I’ve been known to occasionally have ‘Like a Prayer’ on replay – are distraught. They’re denying Ito’s own memory, informing him that Madonna “birthed silent hill.” Meanwhile, Ito is growing increasingly aggravated, saying, “Even if that person posted it as a joke, once it spreads, many people take it at face value.”
And he is right. At the same time, though, I’d really love to introduce Pyramid Head to ‘Like a Virgin.’
Konami seemingly confirms Silent Hill Townfall will be a PlayStation console exclusive at launch.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.