If you've played a survival horror game post the original Resident Evil, there’s a chance that somewhere along the line that game will have been influenced - consciously or not - by a brilliant ‘90s movie called Jacob’s Ladder.
If you’ve not heard of it, stay with me. If you have seen it, you might agree with Roger Ebert, who eloquently described Jacob’s Ladder as a movie that “left me reeling with turmoil and confusion, with feelings of sadness and despair.” He put it better than I can. It’s a movie not easily forgotten.
Minor spoilers for Jacob's Ladder ahead.
Jacob’s Ladder stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, a Vietnam War veteran who was involved in a particularly horrific battle that’s left him psychologically volatile. When we meet him he has married but since divorced, lost a son (played by a brutally cute Macauly Culkin) to tragedy, and has shacked up with a charming-but-tempestuous woman he met while working at the U.S. Post Office. Soon, he begins to experience bizarre hallucinations that send him into a spiral of paranoia.
Jacob’s Ladder might best be described as a ‘horror,’ but like all the best movies that frighten us, its themes are universal. It touches on life and death, faith and cultural attitudes towards the afterlife. Its scares – while confrontational – house a story about a man searching for his family while fighting against an unravelling mental state. It can be read as an allegory for any type of consuming mental illness and is far more forceful than many films that wear those sorts of themes more overtly on their sleeves.
To look for the seeds of Jacob’s Ladder’s impact on survival horror, one only needs to look as far as Team Silent. The studio drew heavily from Jacob’s Ladder when creating the world of Silent Hill, a game that didn’t rely on Resident Evil-style shocks but a slow-burning sense of unease rooted heavily in psychosis. And if we think about the influence that series has had on games subsequently – including every new Silent Hill instalment - Jacob's Ladder runs deep indeed.
While Silent Hill draws from the film in a myriad of ways (and is referenced in a myriad of ways throughout the series), its playful use of perception is the most overt. Jacob’s Ladder is all about a man losing his grasp on reality; In the Silent Hill series, the protagonist is similarly unsure of what is real or what is not. Jacob has his ‘normal,’ or ‘safe’ reality, which is increasingly encroached upon by darker forces; Silent Hill’s Harry has a ‘normal’ (albeit not safe) Silent Hill which is increasingly encroached upon by darker forces.
And then of course there are their alternate realities, darker, more violent versions of these spaces which serve to befuddle and disorient us, keeping us constantly one step behind figuring out what their inevitably grim fates will be.
Further, Jacob's Ladder director Adrian Lyne is very adept at turning ordinary objects or people into revolting ones; a giant slab of meat in a refrigerator, a hobo on a subway train, or a kindly old nurse become abhorrent. The best survival horror games take cues from this ‘ordinary made extraordinary’ approach – Silent Hill was not the first game, nor will it be the last, to put an abandoned wheelchair in a corridor just because.
This sinister imagery hints at larger horrors to come, and in Jacob’s Ladder Lyne does, occasionally, charge at us with armfuls of full blown psychosis. Perhaps the most confrontational of Jacob’s unwitting journey into hell takes place in an asylum, where demonic doctors and nurses strap him to a gurney and push him through corridors littered with dismembered limbs to be ‘operated’ on. The scene was replicated in Silent Hill 2 and most recently Shinji Mikami’s upcoming survival horror The Evil Within, which saw protagonist Sebastian fleeing a giant, chainsaw-wielding butcher in an asylum evocative of Jacob's clinic. When I noted the similarities, Mikami asked “you could tell?”
It’s worth mentioning Jacob’s vulnerability in these situations. Robbins plays him as a goofy, likeable guy; someone ill-equipped to fight the demonic forces appearing in his urban world. With Silent Hill’s Harry, Team Silent told us that our protagonists didn't have to be jacked-up-super-soldiers or mercenaries; they could in fact, be you or I; awkward and untrained, wildly swinging metal pipes through the air. We saw a small influx of similarly ‘underpowered’ protagonists after Harry, and today people tend to think of the everyman protagonist as a survival horror staple. I can’t help but think of Jacob whenever I look at Fatal Frame’s Miku Hinasaki or Silent Hill 2’s James Sunderland (whose initials, coincidentally or not, are JS.)
It’s because of this vulnerability that we care about these protagonists, as they reflect our own helplessness; we want them to find their families or escape the mansion or just figure out what the hell is going on in a world full of red herrings and obtuse clues. The coda they will eventually reach, of course, is the truth; the twist that keeps you compelled to stay with them as they push through the gristly mystery. Jacob’s ending is not a happy one, but it is powerful and importantly, supports the twists and turns that preceded it. And we feel elation at the end of the film, too, which is ultimately the emotion that every survival horror should elicit; an enormous sense of relief after our own short brush with madness.
If you haven't seen Jacob's Ladder and you're a fan of horror in video games, it comes with my highest recommendation.
Lucy O'Brien is Assistant Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on IGN at Luce_IGN_AU,or @Luceobrien on Twitter. Follow the whole Aussie team on the IGN Australia Facebook page while you're at it!
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