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 "Legendary Silent Hill artist clarifies iconic Bubble Head nurse origins after 21 years, yet some fans still don't believe him插图2")
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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.’
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