Exit 8 is now playing in theaters, adapting the video game of the same name. Set in a looping subway system with seemingly no escape, it’s a liminal horror nightmare.
In my Exit 8 review, I said that you might end up dreading your next subway commute even more after watching it. It's amazing how we can take a normal, everyday place and make it so terrifying.
I asked director Genki Kawamura about when he first learned about Exit 8 and why he chose to adapt Kotaku Creates' indie horror game for the big screen.
Kawamura said, "I believe the game came out in November 2023, and I played it almost immediately. And after playing the game myself, I watched a lot of live streams, and I think it was really interesting how simple the game design was."
Exit 8 follows a lone man as he prepares to leave a subway station, but ends up in a loop where he must identify "anomalies" in order to make it out alive. These can range from a commuter acting strangely to a door that's out of place, and they're not always easy to spot.
Kawamura continued: "There was a different story, and a different drama with every player, and it served as this device to kind of get a look into human nature. The Tokyo subway system, the corridors, it's something that we see a lot in our daily lives."
"The Exit 8 designer used that subway backdrop to loop in this repetition, it reminded me of purgatory and Dante's Divine Comedy , where the different sins that humans have committed is almost like reflected back at them as anomalies."
The movie expands on the lore from the Exit 8 video game, with The Lost Man facing a personal dilemma as he receives a life-changing phone call. The game is first-person and doesn't have a backstory like this, so Kawamura worked with lead actor Kazunari Ninomiya to move the concept from the game to the big screen.
Kawamura told me, "Kazunari Ninomiya, who plays the lost man in the film, is a really avid gamer. And what we were trying to do with this film was not adapt a video game to a movie as much as we were trying to blur the lines between what is the video game medium and what is a movie medium?"
"So every time we would call cut on set, Ninomiya would pull out his cell phone and start playing video games. That's the level of his games enthusiasm. So he had a very good understanding of what we were trying to do on a conceptual level."
I think that Exit 8 is a very faithful adaptation of the game, and those who have already played it will be satisfied with how it translates to the screen. It definitely feels like a love letter to video games and was beautifully shot to reflect their style. The end result is very effective indeed.
