One is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a trend (or enemy action, or providence, or the key to structuring a joke, but in this case let’s go with trend). Exit 8 is the second really good video game movie to come out this year and it might turn out to be a surprisingly positive pattern. No, the first isn’t Super Mario Galaxy. That movie seems fine, I’m sure it’s a great kids’ movie, but I’m talking about Iron Lung. You wouldn’t expect a project based on a very small indie video game structured as an almost entirely one-man, one-set show helmed by a Youtuber would be a genuinely excellent horror movie filled with slow burning dread and unknowable cosmic horror, but there you go. Now Exit 8 is out, and I’m starting to wonder if this is a trend.
Exit 8 is an even newer movie based on an indie horror game with a very small scope and limited cast, relying almost entirely on one set. There’s no Youtube angle here, but all of the other parts fit. Most importantly, like Iron Lung, Exit 8 is great.
The idea of the movie Exit 8 is the exact same as the game Exit 8, one of the best examples of the anomaly hunt sub-genre of horror games. There’s a corridor in an unnamed japanese subway station that keeps looping around. A sign directs you to go forward if the corridor is normal, but to turn back if anything is off. Maybe it’s a slightly askew sign. Maybe it’s a murder ghost. Whatever it is, whenever you make the right choice the sign pointing towards the exit goes up by one. It starts at Exit 0 and you can only escape by reaching Exit 8.
It isn’t a long game, but it’s atmospheric, polished, deeply unnerving, and occasionally frustrating. It doesn’t seem conducive to a feature length film, though, especially without any actual characters. Writer and director Genki Kawamura had to create at least one protagonist out of whole cloth, and anyone who reads any kind of fanfic or saw Mortal Kombat 2021 knows how cringey and/or boring turning your OC into the main character can be. Kawamura managed to nail it with Kazunari Ninomiya’s unnamed Lost Man.
He doesn’t get a name, but the Lost Man isn’t a completely blank slate who gets stuck in the corridor. He’s a nervous and rudderless young man with wet eyes whose indecisiveness seems to keep him from maintaining relationships or jobs. The most important details come out from a phone call from his ex-girlfriend telling him she’s pregnant, but it’s Ninomiya’s wet, downturned eyes and quiet, panicked breathing are what give the few lines of exposition real depth. Well, as much depth as this kind of story can have.
The Lost Man runs into a small child, Naru Asamuna’s also unnamed Boy, in the corridor, and this is where the Exit 8 film really threads the needle. You have a completely character-less game structure, you have a main character who’s uncertain about the future and just found out he might become a father, and now you have a lost little boy. That’s a recipe for turning an interesting concept into the writer screaming “THIS IS A METAPHOR!” Fortunately, Exit 8 avoids this by focusing on the mysterious dread of the anomalies and letting the movie-only thematic weight stay mostly unspoken. If anything the parenthood angle actually adds to the game’s structure, thanks to the constant question of “What are you going to do?” It isn’t complicated, but it’s still finessed very well.
None of this would work without the absolutely perfect set design. The corridor from the game Exit 8 is reproduced exactly in the film. It won’t mean anything for viewers coming in blind, but it adds so much for anyone familiar with the game. When you already know the concept of Exit 8, and how overt or subtle the anomalies can be, you end up looking for changes even closer than the Lost Man does. It’s a real bonus to viewing the film, though it’s not necessary; I saw it with a friend of mine who never played or saw Exit 8 and he was still engaged for most of the movie, at least after the slow and quiet build-up.
Camerawork and sound design are also fantastic, enhancing the building dread and constant anxiety of the film. There are so many long, single shots with steady dolly pulls and turns that highlight and obscure angles of the corridor to keep you on edge. Yes, there are a few “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?” shots of Ninomiya’s shoulder near the edge of the frame just before revealing what’s behind him with a quick pan, but generally the cinematography is focused on skillfully building tension by making good use of long expanses of tile and tight views of Ninomiya’s face than setting up what you would assume to be jump scares.
Then there’s sound design, which takes full advantage of spatial audio mixing in thoroughly unsubtle but effective ways. From the very start, when the sounds of the subway jarringly switch between silence and deafening as Ninomiya plays with his earphones, it’s clear how much effort was put into putting you into the ears, if not the shoes, of this man. Phones ringing, babies crying, the click of shoes on tile, and a leitmotif of a handful of notes that play every time a corner is turned keep you on edge, again not for jump scares but for the hope, despair, and frustration of whether or not the sign will say 0 or another number. Or if there will be some kind of murder ghost, that’s always a possibility.
Exit 8 converts everything that makes the game it’s based on interesting to work in the medium of film without building so much on top that it loses its essence in the transition. There’s a little more pathos, a little more characterization, and there’s a good bit of allegorical implication, but none of that pulls the film away from a single corridor that does very weird and unsettling things to the people trapped in it. It’s slow, it’s simple, and it isn’t for everyone, but if you like quiet metaphysical horror it’s a great watch.
Iron Lung and Exit 8 both turned out to be great, which leads us to the upcoming third film that will establish the trend or fall flat. Backrooms comes out May 29, and I expect it to be outright great because of its directorial pedigree. It’s being made by Kane Parsons, also known as Kane Pixels, who made the definitive Backrooms series on YouTube. The movie looks like it will be its own story, but I’d be shocked if it doesn’t align with or even contribute to the lore of his Youtube series. And I know he can make a longer-form horror work, because while Backrooms is an intentionally disjointed episodic series, his other notable work, The Oldest View, is a single enthralling and unsettling story of urban exploration across four episodes totalling 71 minutes. Also, you should watch The Oldest View.
And yes, I know the Backrooms is more of a message board meme/concept in the vein of Slenderman than it is strictly a video game, per se, but Escape The Backrooms exists, and all of that YouTube/analog horror directly birthed and feeds into/off of indie horror games, so I’m going to say it counts. So, trend! Maybe!