Insular Rites - The cultural heritage at the heart of Siren’s darkness

A vicennium of dim disquietThe long, rich history of Japanese horror encompasses a prolific era of fascinating creations emerging at the turn of the millennium, spanning from global best-selling novels to blockbuster movies. The video game medium, too, partook in this fertile creative phenomenon with developers and publishers seizing the potential of rapidly evolving technologies to introduce ever more disturbing experiences to a growing audience, producing results that were altogether unimaginable a mere decade before.Among the most laudable digital experiments of the time, ‘Siren’ was the remarkable act that followed Keiichiro Toyama’s immensely successful venture into the nebulous recesses of survival horror, ‘Silent Hill’. As any careful study of the games will reveal, both productions share a variety of core elements despite occupying significantly different latitudes within the genre’s atlas. And yet ‘Siren’ openly departs from the previously established survival horror norms by…