Horror fans don’t need to do any homework before watching the unsettling video-game-to-movie adaptation Exit 8. The film version is self-contained and devastatingly simple. An unnamed commuter (Kazunari Ninomiya, identified on the screen as “The Lost Man”) gets stuck in an impossible maze of sterile, brightly lit corridors while trying to leave a train station. His ex-girlfriend has just called to tell him she’s pregnant, and she needs a decision from him about their potential child. The corridor loop he’s caught in, and the horrifying manifestations that plague him, reflect his own indecision, immaturity, and weakness. Exit 8 is an escape-room movie where The Lost Man is really trying to escape his own tortured mental state, and it’s effective, efficient, and unnerving.
Still, comparing the different evolutions of the Exit 8 story is fascinating in its own right. Exit 8 started out as a walking-sim indie game that drops the player in that same physics-defying maze of white corridors, searching for anomalies that will signal the way out. But game designer Kotake Create offers no backstory about who the point-of-view character is, or how or why they ended up in the maze. For the movie, writer-director Genki Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase had to build a rationale around the experience, and a character whose situation justifies the world literally warping around him.
“[In] video games as a medium, the player and the main character often overlap,” Kawamura tells Polygon. “So they aren’t very good source material for movie adaptations. A very high-level philosophy I kept when adapting this was, instead of a straight adaptation or a translation, I wanted to blur the boundaries between what the movie medium represents, and what the video game medium represents.”
Kawamura feels that games and movies have evolved with different expectations about the “right” way to tell stories, and for whom. He sees those “lines seemingly kind of drawn in the sand” as limiting for both forms of media.
“I go back to a conference talk session I had with Nintendo’s Miyamoto Shigeru,” Kawamura says. “He told me that really great games, it’s obvious that the player is having a lot of fun — but truly great games, the people watching the player and the screen also need to have a lot of fun. I thought, Well, what’s the audience going to go through for my film? At times, I wanted to place the audience into the shoes of the player, but at other times, I placed the audience in the perspective of someone perhaps viewing a Twitch livestream.”
Kawamura wanted the “viewer as player” and “viewer as audience” perspectives to “coexist in the film” not just as a way of reconciling games and movies, but to make viewers aware of how rarely video game adaptations cross those lines.
“This was perhaps a larger, almost bird’s-eye view of what’s happening in the game industry at large,” he says. “Trying to take this phenomenon of people playing games and watching games, and distill it into a single movie experience.”
