Watching a streamer find their way through the digital labyrinth of some spooky game—particularly one with lots of jumpscares—can be as entertaining as playing the game yourself, and it’s that push and pull between being a player and an observer that has surely fed into the moment that indie horror games are having lately. Streamers and their fans have driven a number of projects made by small game studios to internet virality, and the movie studios have followed, looking towards these very games and their built-in fanbases to find cinema’s next big thing.
It’s a unique type of collective experience, and exactly the phenomenon that Genki Kawamura, director of the horror adaptation Exit 8, tried to capture with his film.
Kawamura recently told me in a Zoom interview that he played the game as soon as it came out, only to later discover its growing army of fans: “I began to watch a lot of different streamers playing the game, and I realized there were as many different stories and interactions with the game as there were people playing it.”
Exit 8 is by no means the only movie to come out of the recent indie horror game boom. Just in the past six months, we’ve had a Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel, the latest installment in the giant franchise about killer animatronic animals that house the ghosts of murdered children; an adaptation of Iron Lung, the sci-fi submarine sim first made famous by streamer Markiplier, who also directed and starred in the movie; and an adaptation of The Mortuary Assistant, the extremely streamer-friendly horror game where the player takes on the role of a rookie embalmer stuck in a morgue with at least one demonically possessed corpse. Soon to come is A24’s Backrooms, based on a popular liminal space creepypasta that has already received numerous video game adaptations.
Exit 8 the movie is based on the similarly titled game The Exit 8. It has a deceptively simple premise. The player finds themself trapped in a single endlessly repeating hallway somewhere in a Japanese subway station, through which they must walk eight times while successfully noting any “anomalies” they see—that is, anything that looks different or out of place. Or downright terrifying, in some cases. It’s a walking simulator, so all you can really do is go back and forth as many times as the game forces you to, which, for Kawamura, made the process of finding the “plot” of the movie somewhat easier.
“I felt that the main character of the film was, perhaps not our human characters, but the corridor itself,” he explained, comparing the aesthetic to Dante’s Divine Comedy. “While in this purgatory, this very white, sanitized corridor, we see a lot of the guilt and the small sins that we commit every day within our mind projected into the external world. The ‘EXIT 8’ sign within the corridor almost feels like this divine creature governing this domain, watching a lot of different humans enter its space, playing different versions of the game and facing their own sins and their own [guilt] in their own way. Which is why none of the characters in the film have a name. I want them to feel like NPCs entering this game that’s being governed by this sign.”
