Resident Evil and Silent Hill are the two Japanese survival horror series every horror player eventually picks between. Capcom's series has sold 213 million units since 1996.1 Konami's started three years later, sold a fraction of that, and is the one critics reach for when they talk about horror games as art.
2026 put them side by side again. Each released a new game and a new film within the same nine months: Resident Evil Requiem and Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, which took $60.2 million in its opening weekend,2 against Silent Hill: Townfall and Return to Silent Hill. Halloween is two weeks away.
Resident Evil sells the fear you can shoot; Silent Hill sells the fear you can't, and every list below is really asking which of those two fears counts.
Resident Evil 7 vs Silent Hill 2: the scariest horror games
This ranking asks the question in its plainest form: which horror game frightens players most. Both series are on it, with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Silent Hill 2 named side by side.
Resident Evil 7 earns its place by taking the camera away. The 2017 reboot moved to first person and locked players inside the Baker family's Louisiana house, and Capcom has sold 18.4 million copies of it.3
Silent Hill 2 scares differently. The 2001 game has few jump scares; its dread comes from James Sunderland's guilt and a town that seems built out of it.
Alien: Isolation is the third name with a real claim. A single creature that cannot be killed is the purest version of what both series do.
P.T.: the Silent Hill that never shipped
The best horror game of all time is a wider question than the scariest one, and Silent Hill enters it twice. Silent Hill 2 is one option. P.T. is the other.
P.T. was a free PlayStation 4 teaser released in 2014: one looping suburban hallway that turned out to be a trailer for Silent Hills, a game by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus. Konami cancelled the project in 2015 and pulled the teaser from the store. Anyone who had already downloaded it kept it, and PlayStation 4 consoles with P.T. installed turned up for resale at inflated prices.
Resident Evil answers with the Resident Evil 2 remake from 2019. It is the complete, finished, best-selling version of the series' formula, the opposite of a teaser that exists mainly as a rumour.
Sixty franchises, two horror series and Super Mario
Here neither series is the obvious pick. The ranking covers more than sixty franchises across every genre, Super Mario, Pokémon, Call of Duty and Minecraft among them, with Resident Evil and Silent Hill as its two horror series.
Resident Evil's case is endurance. It has shipped mainline games in five console generations, rebuilt itself twice and still sells: Capcom counts it as its best-selling series.
Silent Hill's case is shorter and stranger. Konami went more than a decade without a new mainline game after Downpour in 2012, and the series' reputation survived mostly on its first four entries.
Super Mario is the name both have to get past. Nintendo's plumber has been the industry's default answer since 1985.
Silent Hill 2 vs Resident Evil 4: what survival horror means
Survival horror is the genre both series are filed under, and the term itself came from Resident Evil: the 1996 original opened with the line "Enter the survival horror". This ranking puts Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 4 at the top of the same list.
The two games define the genre's opposite ends. Resident Evil 4, released in 2005, moved the camera over Leon Kennedy's shoulder and turned the series toward action. The game took years to find that shape: one early prototype was spun off into Devil May Cry, Capcom's action series. Plenty of fans count it as the moment Resident Evil stopped being survival horror at all.
Silent Hill 2 stayed slow. Combat is clumsy on purpose, ammunition matters, and the monsters are symbols before they are enemies.
Two outside picks, Dead Space from 2008 and The Last of Us from 2013, both borrow openly from Resident Evil 4.
Psychological horror, where Resident Evil 7 is the outsider
Psychological horror is Silent Hill's home ground. This list of 18 games includes both the 1999 original and Silent Hill 2, and the genre's usual reference points were written by Team Silent.
Resident Evil has one entry: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. It earns the place through its first half, when the Baker house is all disorientation and no explanation, before the game turns back into Resident Evil with guns and bosses.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the game that took the idea furthest. Frictional Games removed combat entirely in 2010, and a decade of hide-and-run horror followed.
Fatal Frame, Signalis and Mouthwashing fill out the rest with the quieter, stranger end of the field.
Silent Hill 2 (2024) vs Resident Evil 4 (2023): the remake race
Remakes are where Resident Evil has led for years. Capcom's Resident Evil 2 remake has sold 19.7 million copies while its Resident Evil 4 remake has reached 16.0 million.3 Five of the 11 games on this list belong to the series.
Silent Hill had one shot, and it went to Bloober Team, a Polish studio known for Layers of Fear. Fans expected the worst. The Silent Hill 2 remake arrived in October 2024 with Akira Yamaoka back on the score, new areas and reworked combat around the same story, and by April 2026 Konami counted more than 6 million players of Silent Hill 2.4
Dead Space from 2023 is the outside contender, a remake so close to its source that it reads as a restoration.
Pyramid Head vs Nemesis
Each series has a monster that walks after you, and this ranking of 23 video game villains has both. Pyramid Head is from Silent Hill 2. Nemesis is from Resident Evil 3, released in 1999.
They do the same job for opposite reasons. Nemesis is a bioweapon sent to kill the S.T.A.R.S. team, so his pursuit has a plot explanation and a rocket launcher. Pyramid Head is the executioner James Sunderland believes he deserves, and the game never says more than that.
Albert Wesker gives Resident Evil a second entry. Bowser, GLaDOS and Sephiroth carry the rest of a list where neither horror monster is the default pick.
Return to Silent Hill vs Welcome to Raccoon City: the films
This is the inverted list: the worst video game movies ever made. Both series qualify, and both entries are recent.
Return to Silent Hill opened in January 2026. Christophe Gans, who directed the 2006 Silent Hill film, adapted Silent Hill 2; critics gave it 18% on Rotten Tomatoes from 66 reviews.5 Silent Hill: Revelation from 2012 is on the list too.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is from 2021. Johannes Roberts tried to fit the first two games into one film, and the reboot never got a second.
The rest belong to the genre's long history of misses. Super Mario Bros. from 1993 is the original, and Uwe Boll directed four of the others.
Resident Evil Requiem vs Silent Hill: Townfall, both from 2026
The best games of 2026 is the one ranking where both series arrive with brand-new entries.
Resident Evil Requiem came out on February 27. It follows the FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft with Leon Kennedy back, holds a Metascore of 89 on PlayStation 5,6 and passed 8 million copies before July.3
Silent Hill: Townfall followed on September 24, developed by the Scottish studio Screen Burn and co-published by Annapurna Interactive and Konami. Its Metascore is 80.7
The field is crowded. Forza Horizon 6, Mina the Hollower, Pokémon Pokopia and Mewgenics all had strong years, and Grand Theft Auto VI is still due in November.
PlayStation 2: Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2 and San Andreas
Both series' most celebrated games came out on the same console. Silent Hill 2 launched on PlayStation 2 in 2001, and Resident Evil 4 reached it in late 2005 after starting on GameCube.
On this list neither is the expected leader. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the console's best-known game, and Shadow of the Colossus, Final Fantasy X, God of War II and Snake Eater sit beside it.
Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill 2 score vs Resident Evil 4
Silent Hill has an advantage in this ranking that Resident Evil cannot match: one composer. Akira Yamaoka scored the first four games, and his Silent Hill 2 soundtrack mixes trip-hop, industrial noise and the piano of "Theme of Laura". Three of the ten soundtracks here are Silent Hill's.
Resident Evil's music has been written by many hands. Its strongest entry is Resident Evil 4, whose save-room theme generations of players associate with relief.
Yamaoka is still part of the series. He returned for the 2024 remake and for Silent Hill f, released in September 2025, which Konami said passed 2 million units shipped by April 2026.4
Bloodborne and Dead Space are the best scores here from outside both series.
Raccoon City vs Silent Hill: the towns
Both series are named after a place, or nearly. This ranking of horror game towns asks which one players would least want to visit, and it holds Raccoon City alongside Silent Hill itself.
Raccoon City is a company town. Umbrella Corporation built its labs underneath it, the T-virus escaped, and the US government erased the city with a missile at the end of Resident Evil 3.
Silent Hill is less a location than a condition. The fog, the sirens and the Otherworld change depending on who arrives, which is why each game can return to the same streets with a new protagonist.
Rapture from BioShock and Yharnam from Bloodborne are the strongest rivals, and Shepherd's Glen sits just across the lake from Silent Hill.
Doom, Resident Evil and the 1990s
The 18 most influential games of the 1990s include Resident Evil and leave Silent Hill out. The omission is fair on dates: Silent Hill arrived in 1999, too late to shape the decade it closed.
Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil came out in March 1996 and set the template the rest of the genre followed: fixed camera angles, scarce ammunition, locked doors and typewriter saves. Silent Hill itself was Konami's answer to it.
Doom is the frame's other name. id Software's 1993 shooter shaped first-person games the way Resident Evil shaped horror, and Super Mario 64, Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid complete a list where every entry started something.
Konami's best games: Silent Hill 2 vs Metal Gear Solid
The last list belongs to Silent Hill alone. Resident Evil is a Capcom series and has no place among the 15 best Konami games, where Silent Hill 2 is one of the publisher's own classics.
Its problem is the company it keeps. Metal Gear Solid and its sequel Snake Eater are Hideo Kojima's, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the template for a whole genre, and Contra and Gradius date back to the arcades.
Kojima links this list to the rest of the article. He made the Metal Gear games at Konami, then made P.T. for Silent Hills, and left the company later in 2015, the year that project was cancelled.
Two kinds of fear
Resident Evil leads wherever a list rewards what can be counted: sales, remakes, influence, box office. Silent Hill leads wherever it rewards what stays with the player afterwards: a score, a monster, a town.
Every one of these lists is decided by matchups, one pair after another, which is how pairwise ranking works. If a horror series of your own deserves this treatment, building its ranking takes a few minutes.
More rankings, more angles
- Is Resident Evil the Best Horror Franchise? 14 Fan Rankings — Capcom's series alone, at 30
- Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter: Which Is Better? 15 Lists — Capcom's other famous rivalry, born in arcades
- Final Fantasy vs the Greatest RPGs of All Time: 16 Lists — Square's series as JRPG and soundtrack
Sources
- Capcom — Game Series Sales, Resident Evil cumulative units as of June 30, 2026: capcom.co.jp (checked 2026-10-14)
- The Numbers — Resident Evil (2026), opening weekend and box office: the-numbers.com (checked 2026-10-14)
- Capcom — Platinum Titles, unit sales of Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 2 (2019), Resident Evil 4 (2023) and Resident Evil Requiem as of June 30, 2026: capcom.co.jp (checked 2026-10-14)
- Konami — Silent Hill f passes 2 million units shipped; Silent Hill 2 passes 6 million players (May 13, 2026): konami.com (checked 2026-10-14)
- Rotten Tomatoes — Return to Silent Hill: rottentomatoes.com (checked 2026-10-14)
- Metacritic — Resident Evil Requiem: metacritic.com (checked 2026-10-14)
- Metacritic — Silent Hill: Townfall: metacritic.com (checked 2026-10-14)