Heather Mason

• 1. Introduction

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  Heather Mason was seventeen years old when a private investigator named Douglas Cartland first approached her in a shopping mall. She tried to escape from him. Within hours, she was surrounded by monsters. Silent Hill 3, released in 2003 by Konami, cast Heather as the main protagonist of a story far larger than she understood. She carried something inside her body. A fanatical religious cult had been waiting years to extract it. The answers reached back to a girl named Alessa Gillespie. Her mother organized a ritual in the small American town of Silent Hill that left Alessa with severe burns across her body.

• 2. A Soul Divided

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  One of Alessa Gillespie's only friends was a girl named Claudia Wolf, whom Alessa loved as a sister. Most of her peers were not kind. Children at school called her a witch. She possessed strange supernatural abilities that her mother Dahlia exploited rather than protected. Dahlia forced Alessa into The Order, a cult devoted to bringing a god into the world. When Alessa was seven, Dahlia and The Order staged a ceremony to use her body for that purpose. She did not birth the god. She split her soul instead.

  A truck driver named Travis Grady was present during the crisis that followed. Using her supernatural powers, Alessa separated her spirit from her body and appeared to him as a ghostly apparition. She led Travis across Silent Hill to assemble an artifact called the Flauros. With the Flauros, she stopped The Order from completing their goal. She then caused half of her soul to take the form of a newborn baby outside the town. Harry Mason and his wife Jodie found the infant and named her Cheryl. Alessa, burned and bedridden, remained hidden under the care of The Order and a nurse named Lisa Garland.

  Seven years later, Harry was a widower. He took Cheryl on vacation to Silent Hill. Alessa sensed them coming and sent a ghostly apparition in front of their jeep, forcing a crash that left Harry separated from Cheryl. Dahlia tricked Harry into believing Alessa was a demon. That deception made him an unwitting participant in The Order's plan to merge Alessa and Cheryl back into one being. When the merged soul completed its transformation, it handed Harry a newborn infant: a reincarnation of Alessa and Cheryl combined. Harry hesitated before agreeing to raise the child. He named her Cheryl at first, then started calling her Heather.

  Claudia Wolf, now a high-ranking member of The Order, had not forgotten what Harry did. She had been making her own plans for years.

• 3. Nightmare at Seventeen

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  Vincent Smith appeared during Heather's long night and claimed to be on her side. Getting home required crossing a nightmare version of the shopping mall, then an abandoned subway station, the town's sewers, and a crumbling department building. Along the way, Claudia appeared briefly and told Heather that The Order needed her before vanishing without explanation.

  Heather made it home to find her father murdered. Claudia had ordered the killing as revenge for what Harry did during the events of the original Silent Hill. She had also wanted to provoke Heather's hatred, counting on that emotion to drive Heather back to Silent Hill. After Heather killed the monster responsible for her father's death, a remorseful Douglas offered to take her there to find Claudia.

  Vincent, whose true loyalties were not yet clear, advised her to begin at the hospital once they arrived in town.

• 4. God and the Red Pellet

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  Claudia's father Leonard was at the hospital, and he was no longer quite human when Heather arrived. She killed the monster he had become. Vincent then directed her to the Church, which lay past the town's local amusement park. At the park, Heather encountered an injured Douglas. She left him behind. Walking alone, she faced Memory of Alessa, an alternate version of herself. The creature, once destroyed, revealed something unexpected: it had formed from Alessa's desire to kill herself before The Order's god could be born.

  At the Church, Heather rejected Claudia and The Order's beliefs to her face. Claudia retreated deeper into the building. Deep inside, Heather walked into an argument between Claudia and Vincent. Vincent admitted he was a priest for The Order but had no desire to see God born. Claudia silenced him by stabbing him to death. The killing was followed immediately by an agonizing pain in Heather's abdomen.

  The cause of that pain was a secret no one had shared with Heather. When she was reincarnated, God's fetus had been reborn inside her. Claudia had been feeding it with Heather's hatred. Before the birth could happen, Heather reached into a necklace her father had given her and removed a small red pellet. The pellet contained an Aglaophotis, a liquid capable of expelling demons from the body. Heather used it to vomit up the fetus. Before she could destroy it, Claudia swallowed it. Claudia died. God was born from her. Heather killed God, and afterward stood weeping, thinking of her father.

  Silent Hill 3 offers three different endings. In the normal ending, Heather meets Douglas and decides to start going by Cheryl again. In the possessed ending, she kills Douglas instead. In the joke ending called Revenge, Harry turns out to still be alive. Heather tells him what happened, and he responds by sending an army of UFOs to destroy the town. A later game in the series, Silent Hill: Homecoming, revealed that Douglas had exposed The Order to the world. That detail points toward the normal ending as canon.

  The character's story did not end with the credits. Silent Hill: Revelation, a 2012 film, cast Heather as its main character, played by Adelaide Clemens.

• 5. Beyond Silent Hill

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  Clemens said she had to get 'incredibly strong, and incredibly fit' for the role. She also studied the franchise's mythology, including the symbolic significance of its monsters. The 2006 Silent Hill film had taken a different approach. Two actors portrayed Alessa: Lorry Ayers as an adult, and Jodelle Ferland as a child. In Revelation, Erin Pitt also appeared in the role.

  In 2009, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories reimagined the original game. The character appeared there as Cheryl Heather Mason, with Heather as her middle name. The game's final act revealed her to be its true protagonist. In 2020, the multiplayer game Dead by Daylight added her as a playable character, now going by Cheryl. She appeared alongside Pyramid Head, Lisa Garland, Cybil Bennett, Maria, and James Sunderland. Dead by Daylight established its own version of her story: Cheryl works at a center for troubled youths but remains haunted by the events of Silent Hill 3.

  She also appeared in Silent Hill: Book of Memories as a downloadable character, with cameos in that game's endings and in Silent Hill: Downpour. Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, an unrelated Konami game, and Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals also included her.

  The character's name and appearance were both inspired by her original voice actress, Heather Morris. Morris also performed the motion capture for the role.

• 6. Born From Sketches

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  Early rough sketches of Heather modeled her after two French actresses, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Vanessa Paradis. Those initial designs made her look too innocent for what the team had in mind. The next round of sketches drew on Sophie Marceau and, again, Gainsbourg, this time to give her more attitude.

  Character designer Shingo Yuri imagined Heather wearing jeans. The female members of the development team had other ideas. They argued that showing her legs would give her a more feminine look, and they convinced Yuri. The same group pushed for curly hair over Heather's more natural original hairstyle. Her hair was also cut shorter than originally planned. Animating realistic long hair would have strained the PlayStation 2's processing power, and the team directed those resources toward increasing the number of monsters onscreen. Heather's original visual design was not discarded entirely; it was later reused for Elle Holloway, a character in Silent Hill: Homecoming.

  Morris drew on childhood taekwondo training for the combat sequences. The creators had originally planned to call the character Helen. After working with Morris, they decided the name sounded old-fashioned and changed it. In early promotional materials and on the back of the original game's cover, the character was still listed as Heather Morris, matching the actress's name exactly.

  Morris described Heather as 'sort of a bad-ass and a bit of a tomboy' who was 'quite fearless and strong' despite her youth. She worked on a blank stage with no physical monsters present. She said she often stopped the motion capture so the team could look together at computer images of the creatures she was supposed to be interacting with. Morris described them as 'creepy and quite scary.'

  Game Revolution's Chris Hudak later found the resulting character more compelling than either of her predecessors in the series.

• 7. An Unlikely Heroine

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  Bernard Perron, writing in Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, observed that Heather's temper and sharp tongue were distinctive. Among survival horror's female leads, Rule of Rose, Clock Tower 3, and Fatal Frame had centered characters he described as more frail or innocent. Heather stood apart.

  Hudak also credited her with 'attitude, some vulnerability and even some snarky teenaged wit.' James Hawkins of Joystick Division placed her tenth on his 2010 ranking of the top ten badass women in video game history. Mania Entertainment's Briana Lawrence ranked her fifth on a similar list the same year. Schuyler J. Dievendorf of The Escapist included her on his 2014 list of the most badass women in games. He wrote that she had 'become numbed to the nightmare' but 'keeps going' where most people 'would have cracked.'

  CNET described her as 'absolutely human and eminently relatable.' UGO Networks placed her second on its 2011 list of the best child characters in video games. The same outlet highlighted her Princess Heather alternate costume, calling its look Sailor Moon-esque. Leigh Alexander of GamePro included Heather in an argument for what a positive portrayal of women in games could look like. She cited Heather alongside Alyx Vance, Jade, and Chell as examples of what the medium could achieve.

  Not all assessments were positive. An essay in Unraveling Resident Evil criticized Heather for following a traditional trope. The essay grouped her with Rebecca and Claire from the Resident Evil series under the label 'sexless child,' contrasting them with the more adult Ada.

  In 2013, Complex ranked her the 36th greatest heroine in video game history. The entry declared that Complex still loved her, in their words, 'despite the massive pile of fail known as Silent Hill Revelation 3D.'