Raccoon City and Silent Hill are the two towns survival horror was built on. In Resident Evil, Raccoon City is a Midwestern American city overrun by the T-virus, a bioweapon made in secret by the Umbrella Corporation; its monsters come out of a lab, and there is a company to blame. In Silent Hill, the town is a foggy lakeside resort that shifts into a rusted nightmare called the Otherworld; its monsters come out of the people who visit it.
Nemesis and Mr. X are Umbrella's Tyrants, sent into Raccoon City in Resident Evil 3 and Resident Evil 2. Pyramid Head is the hooded executioner of Silent Hill 2. All three are on the Resident Evil and Silent Hill shelves. Below, each fact names the game it comes from. Spoilers for the original games and their remakes.
Umbrella and the T-virus
In public, the Umbrella Corporation is a giant drug company. In private, its labs build bio-organic weapons, B.O.W.s for short. The T-virus, short for Tyrant virus, is its main tool: a virus developed from an older one, the Progenitor virus, that rewrites whatever it infects.
In people, it causes the series' zombies: the dead get back up, hungry and slow. In animals, it makes things like the zombie dogs called Cerberus. Umbrella's real goal is controllable weapons, such as the reptilian Hunters and, at the top of the line, the Tyrant: a tall, humanoid super-soldier. The G-virus, a rival project inside Umbrella, goes further still and turns its host into a creature that keeps mutating.
S.T.A.R.S. and the mansion
S.T.A.R.S. stands for Special Tactics And Rescue Service, an elite unit of the Raccoon City Police Department. In the first Resident Evil (1996), set in July 1998, a string of killings in the Arklay Mountains outside the city leads Bravo Team into the forest, where it goes missing. Alpha Team follows, among them Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, the pilot Brad Vickers and the captain, Albert Wesker.
Chased by infected dogs, they take shelter in a mansion that turns out to sit on top of an Umbrella lab, where the T-virus has escaped and the staff have turned. Wesker is Umbrella's man inside S.T.A.R.S., and he releases its prize weapon, the Tyrant, to show what it can do; it turns on him first. The survivors destroy the Tyrant and escape as the mansion blows up. Back in the city, nobody believes them, and Umbrella wants the rest of S.T.A.R.S. silenced.
The last days of Raccoon City
Resident Evil 2 (1998; remade in 2019) is set in late September 1998. Shortly before, Umbrella's own soldiers tried to take the G-virus from its creator, William Birkin, and in the fallout the T-virus got into the city's water supply. By the time Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop on his first day, and Claire Redfield, Chris's sister, drive in, most of Raccoon City has turned.
Resident Evil 3 (1999; remade in 2020) covers the same days from Jill's side, as she tries to get out of the city. It ends at dawn on 1 October 1998, when a missile strike wipes Raccoon City off the map to contain the outbreak. The scandal that follows eventually brings Umbrella down.
Nemesis vs Mr. X
Both are Tyrants from Umbrella's T-103 line, and both are built to keep walking after you. The difference is what they are for.
Mr. X is the T-103 unit sent into Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2, ordered to recover a sample of the G-virus from the chaos. He fights bare-handed, in a long coat. Near the end, badly damaged, he loses the coat and mutates into the faster, clawed Super Tyrant. The 2019 remake turned him into the stalker that made the game: heavy footsteps you hear through the walls of the police station before he walks round the corner.
Nemesis, from Resident Evil 3, is a T-103 body with a parasite implanted, the NE-α, which grows its own brain inside the host. That makes it smarter: it follows precise orders, and uses weapons, carrying a rocket launcher. Its orders are to hunt down the surviving members of S.T.A.R.S., Jill above all, and it says the unit's name out loud when it finds one. Mr. X is the purer Tyrant; Nemesis is the one with a target list.
Silent Hill: the fog and the Otherworld
In Silent Hill (1999), Harry Mason crashes his car on the way into town and wakes to find his young adopted daughter, Cheryl, gone. The town is empty, smothered in thick fog, with snow falling out of season. This is the Fog World, the first layer.
The second is the Otherworld: the same streets turned dark, rusted and caged in metal grating. In the first game and the 2006 film, a siren warns that the shift is coming. The cause, in the first game, is a girl called Alessa Gillespie. A local cult used her in a ritual to give birth to its god, and her pain and power shaped the nightmare. Cheryl turns out to be part of Alessa's soul.
Silent Hill 2 changes the rule. The town no longer runs on one girl's nightmare: it reads whoever arrives and builds their guilt into the streets.
What Pyramid Head means
In Silent Hill 2 (2001; remade in 2024), James Sunderland gets a letter from his wife, Mary, asking him to meet her in Silent Hill. Mary is dead. James goes anyway.
The town sends him Pyramid Head, called the Red Pyramid Thing in the game's own material: a huge figure in a heavy metal helmet that comes to a point, dragging an enormous blade called the Great Knife and later carrying a spear. The town's historical society keeps a painting of its old executioners in similar hoods, and that is his role: he is James's wish to be punished, made solid.
The reason comes late. Mary was ill for a long time, and James ended her life himself, then pushed the memory away. At the end two Pyramid Heads appear; once James accepts what he did and says he no longer needs them, they destroy themselves. The figure has turned up elsewhere since, including the 2006 film, but in Silent Hill 2 he only makes sense as James's own creation.
On the back of a tee
The two towns are two kinds of fear. Raccoon City's monsters are made in a lab and can be shot; Silent Hill's are made in the mind and have to be faced. Both shelves, Resident Evil and Silent Hill, are drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why they work on the back: a Tyrant in a long coat and an executioner under a pointed helmet are giant, dark silhouettes, built to fill a screen and loom over you, and they fill a back print the same way.
On the shelf
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