The first point of discussion is the monsters in each game. Resident Evil has some undoubtedly grotesque monsters. Outside of the core zombies, Resident Evil has brought some grotesque creepy-crawlies. Resident Evil 3’s Nemesis ranks among the most memorable Resident Evil monsters, but Nemesis? Tyrant? The Regenerators? These are fearsome monsters…

But, ultimately, Silent Hill’s monsters are more frightening than anything Resident Evil has to offer. This is in part due to how enigmatic and haunting they all are. Pyramid Head is far less gross looking than Nemesis, but there’s something so otherworldly about him you can’t help but fear him. Every Silent Hill monster looks like something straight out of a nightmare rather than a possible product of science.

Resident Evil excels at two kinds of scares: gross-out scares and jump scares. One of the most iconic scares in the whole series comes in the first game, where you’re walking down a hall and dogs spring through the glass. The timing is right. The fear is right. It leaves you shaken. Later entries up the gross factor as well.

On the other hand, Silent Hill excels at existential terror. It excels at hitting you with things that make you question your sanity and reality. It’s uncertain if any of the horrors you’re witnessing are products of some dark cosmology gone amuck or the inner workings of the protagonist’s broken psyche coming to life. Either way, it strikes at a core fear: fear of the unknown. However, that unknown might be beyond the known universe or inside our very souls. That’s some heavy stuff.

Resident Evil excels at bringing us to isolated locations. Evil villages? Lost mansions? Abandoned cities? All of these are unique locals that make us feel uncomfortable. By comparison, Silent Hill primarily takes place in one town. Resident Evil has made multiple locations, from the familiar to the alien, feel unsafe.

However, Silent Hill makes you feel alone in every entry. It makes you fear your environment. It makes you fear feeling isolated and closed off. Dark hallways are empty. You have no idea what will happen around the bend or behind the door. The falling snow/ash leaves you uncertain what lies at the other end of the street. All of this is made worse by the sound design…

Silent Hill’s soundtrack is terrifying. Resident Evil’s is not. There is not a single track on the Resident Evil soundtrack that is as haunting as any of the tracks of the original four Silent Hill games. From the industrial chase music to the haunting melodies, every song in Silent Hill serves one purpose: to immerse you in this alien world. Resident Evil’s music, when it does play, has little impact.

Of course, Resident Evil does excel in one way: it brings the gore and body horror. Between the gory deaths – be it being eaten alive, chainsawed through the neck, or just impaled on tendrils – and the grotesque body horrors – parasitic lifeforms springing through an enemy’s blown up head, spider-creatures laying eggs in you, or just nightmarish transformations – Resident Evil is far grosser than Silent Hill.

However, grossness isn’t necessarily scarier. This is especially true when there is no existential threat associated with the grossness. You’re just trying to survive, but, unlike the Xenomorph in Alien, there is no deeper subtext to the body horror. Everything in Silent Hill, however, has a deeper subtext, which makes it ring far harder when something nightmarish occurs.

Resident Evil ultimately devolved overtime. By the time the fourth game hit the market, it transitioned from survival horror to horror-action. The action parts gave the player far too much power, making it easier and easier to avoid death. It’s hard to be afraid when you can blow up your enemies. While Resident Evil 4 is a fun game, it wasn’t until the seventh main entry that Resident Evil became scary again. Even then, the players became powerful in ways the players in Silent Hill never could become.

While some of the later Silent Hill games did give the player more power and more command, they never managed to make you feel too powerful. The threats rang true as threats. The best games in the series always made you question if you could fight your way through a problem by limiting your artillery and making combat deliberately difficult. This might’ve been less fun to play, but it was this way by design. The designers wanted you to feel unsafe and unable to defend yourself.

The most frightening game in both series is PT – the playable demo for the unmade Silent Hills that takes all the elements that make Silent Hill the scarier entry and boils them down into one game. You feel unsafe as you wander a strange location, unable to fight back or resist, hoping to survive through the unknown in a cosmic, existential nightmare. It represents why Silent Hill is the scarier franchise: it is an unknown, unforgiving wasteland of fear.