I realize during previews at my Iron Lung movie screening, between squeaking in my pleather seat and wafts of people's salty theater treats, that movies have just discovered indie video games. Since the first Five Nights at Freddy's adaptation's financial success in 2023, there's been an observable increase in movies based on indie games, with Iron Lung, The Mortuary Assistant, and the new Exit 8 all materializing at once like fresh popcorn. And I hope they continue to do so – they offer movies an opportunity to kill their bad luck with game adaptations through a new kind of folk horror.
Movies haven't been able to invent their own folk horror since The Blair Witch Project's notorious marketing campaign in 1999, which swore the actors in its found footage movie were real people missing in the Maryland woods. Now, audiences are either too familiar with the gimmick or mistrustful of ad campaigns. They'd rather donate their imaginations to an indie horror story.
Give up the ghost
That speaks to the intimate nature of not only small-scale horror compared to something like Resident Evil, whose string of 2000s movies hardly ever tried to be scary, but also the streamers and YouTubers largely responsible for publicizing indie games. Through mega-popular personalities like Markiplier – who made his directorial debut with Iron Lung, based on the 2022 game he played during a YouTube video with 16 million views – fans seek the veil. They want a haunted atmosphere that dissolves the membrane between Twitch streamer and viewer, as well as the boundary between real and computer-generated life.
The past 14 years of viral indie horror games – Red Barrels' Outlast in 2013, Five Nights at Freddy's in 2014, and so on – all throw out the concept of the video game protagonist with watermelon-sized muscles and replace him with a skinny little wreck. This powerless protagonist is much easier to relate to as a stream viewer, or a game player – two positions that put you at the mercy of whatever's on your screen – and they are more efficient at dropping that veil. It's grim, but Slender, the 2012 game based on the Slender Man creepypasta (another strain of internet folk horror), might not otherwise be associated with a 12-year-old's attempted murder of her classmate.
Silent screams
Indie horror games also have more subtle methods of clawing out their players', or viewers', deep fascination. Usually, it's through grime. Their aesthetic dust, dirt, and existential decay.
Each indie game I've mentioned so far is partly convincing folk horror because its creators have no choice but to find elegance in mundanity – just as a princess' kiss transforms a frog, or a wicked witch rides a broom. Unreal, low-poly graphics can be a necessity for indie developers with no budget or team, and these visuals are best at making frightening kaleidoscopes of familiar environments. Dredge, for example, whose live-action adaptation was announced in 2024, is primarily a fishing game. It requires you to get comfortable with the fisherman's ritual, easing your boat onto cold water and waiting for something good to happen. But when the game's supernatural elements finally jack-in-the-box, they rip through the facade of everyday routine while also revealing themselves as part of it.
I love that aspect of indie horror games. So all I want is for the next wave of indie horror movies – which includes Dredge, plus, Godzilla studio Legendary plans to adapt Poppy Playtime, and The Autopsy of Jane Doe director André Øvredal is due to lead a Bendy and the Ink Machine movie – to avoid the fate of mainstream game adaptations.
Five Nights at Freddy's couldn't escape it. The first movie and its 2025 sequel crushed box office expectations with a meat tenderizer, sure, but they were both also as exhausting to watch as Sisyphus rolling his boulder. Not nearly as mind-numbing as major studio Konami's Silent Hill 2 movie, Return to Silent Hill – whose $23 million budget actually makes it more of a pipsqueak compared to approximately $40 million Five Nights at Freddy's 2 – but still a disappointment. Exit 8 is a more promising example, demonstrating the value of a director who understands what makes indie horror games appealing to begin with.
Subtle dread
Director Genki Kawamura retains the Exit 8 game's prodding anxiety by focusing the movie's plot around the game's loop – players must find "anomalies" in an apparently normal, though strangely bare, repeating Tokyo subway corridor in order to leave through the elusive Exit 8. Kawamura lets the cameras linger on the tooth-white walls and the sharpness of each corner Exit 8's protagonist needs to turn down. He uses this environment – recognizable but wrong – to emphasize other quiet horrors; the mental, emotional, physical stuckness of the situation and of its protagonist's life.
Ultimately, the Exit 8 movie is closer to the new lovers and old gods of horror blockbusters like Paranormal Activity (2009) or The Lighthouse (2019), rather than the red alert self-consciousness of a video game movie that really wants you to know it's based on a video game, like the Minecraft movie in 2025. But there shouldn't be fourth-wall breaks and constant reminders of who you are, what you're doing in indie horror. You should feel like you're in a shared nightmare.
Exit 8 releases in theaters on April 10 in the US and on April 24 in the UK. But there are plenty more upcoming horror movies coming in 2026.
