How Exit 8 “Blurs The Line Between Video Games And Movies”

In the video game The Exit 8, players walk through an underground hallway of a Japanese metro station. If they notice anything different or strange with the hallway — any anomalies — they need to turn back, or else something horrifying will happen and they’ll be stuck in a loop forever. It’s a deceptively simple (and creepy!) premise for a game, but while playing “spot the difference in a liminal space” makes for good gameplay, it doesn’t offer much of a narrative for a full feature film. Yet that didn’t stop Genki Kawamura from venturing into the nightmare subway.

Now opening in the United States months after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival and in Japanese theaters last year, Exit 8 continues an ongoing trend of video game movies that are actually pretty darn good. Kawamura, who cowrote the movie in addition to directing it, found ways to give Exit 8 an emotional center that the game lacked while still capturing the uncanny experience of walking down the seemingly endless tiled hallway.

Speaking to Inverse with the help of a translator, Kawamura explained the symbolism he found in the game’s loops, the uneasy appeal of liminal spaces, and how the names of two iconic horror directors found their way onto the set.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Exit 8, like a lot of video games, doesn’t have much in terms of a narrative. For the movie, you created a new emotion-driven plot about a man reeling with the news that his girlfriend is pregnant. Where did this idea come from?

I commute on the subway in Tokyo every day to get to the office. I notice that everyone is on their smartphones. Despite us all being together on this train, it feels very isolated, and people won’t even notice a crying baby on these trains. Even on our smartphones, we’re scrolling through timelines and seeing violence or wars, and we’ll scroll right past it. We’re all guilty on some level of pretending not to see what’s in front of us. It’s a very selfish age and era on both a micro and a macro level. If you look at the geopolitical landscape right now, it’s always “our country first.” I think that also extends to individuals and the responsibility they have to their families. Oftentimes we might prioritize the individual over the needs of the family. I think it’s a very hard time and age to be a parent right now. So I thought, “What if these accumulated small instances of guilt and sin were manifested in this very sanitized white corridor, projected onto it, and turned back so people have to face what they’ve been ignoring this entire time?” That, to me, was a very, very terrifying thought.

Did you have these ideas before you were involved in adapting the game into a movie, or did you see this game and think, “What’s a way that I can dig deeper into this?”? Which came first?

It’s both. There’s this theme that I felt in daily life that I wanted to tell. At the same time, when I encountered the game Exit 8, it provided the perfect backdrop to explore this theme much deeper. When the game came out, I immediately played it myself, but I also watched a lot of Twitch live streams. I realized there are as many stories as there are people playing Exit 8. I think a lot of that has to do with the simplicity of the game design and the mechanics. It serves as a device to explore human nature and different spectrums and shades of gray of human nature. I found parallels between the corridor and Dante’s Divine Comedy, this idea of purgatory. So, in a way it helped me explore a theme that I was thinking about but also gave it a set of rules that helped convey that idea to audiences.

Was that part of what prompted the decision to have multiple protagonists? We’re kind of watching three different players go through the game.

I had a conversation with Shigeru Miyamoto a long time ago, and he told me a really great game must not only entertain the player but the people watching the player and what the player is doing on the screen. So I wanted to incorporate this idea into the film. At times the audience is put into the perspective of the player, and at other times I show the audience what it would be like to view a live stream. I tried to encapsulate the phenomena that is happening in the video game industry itself into a film. I thought that would be really interesting. It’s because the rules that govern Exit 8 are so simple that it lends itself to so many different styles of gameplay and types of stories.

Right — a core challenge for video game movies is that, with games, part of the fun comes from playing them and controlling the character’s actions. With a movie, you are just watching. Exit 8 solves this by having moments where the viewer is trying to spot anomalies, just like they would be if they were playing.

Thank you for noticing that. I thought really long and hard about how to get the audience invested and engaged in this idea of spotting the difference, collectively, in this movie theater. A lot of it came down to the camerawork and the composition of certain shots. I wanted it to feel as though it was watching a Twitch stream. The same could be said for watching different live streams of certain video games. The element of enjoying the player going through their actions but also trying to get ahead of the player and noticing things that perhaps they haven’t noticed yet. I thought if we could re-create that type of tension within a movie, it would withstand that test of time. I think that’s what propelled it to the film festival circuit and had it play at Cannes.

Liminal spaces are having a moment — like with this and the upcoming movie The Backrooms. Why do you think this subgenere of horror is so effective and popular right now?

If you look at our reality right now, we’re faced with all these wars and violence, which is why I think a lot of our fears are inward-facing. It happens within our memories and within our mind itself. Liminal space offers this backdrop where it almost feels familiar because we’ve seen it before, but it can also be kind of scary and fragmented. It’s opening these secret doors within ourselves that we’ve never opened before and have to come face-to-face with. That, I think, is much scarier than monsters or ghosts. The same could be said for the modern human. I took a lot of inspiration from The Shining. It’s this somewhat familiar, large lodge hotel-type of setting, and we’re going through these corridors. In Exit 8, the corridor almost takes on this will of its own. It becomes this monster that’s toying with humans. I even consider the corridor to be the main character of this film.

I think The Backrooms, with a very young director, is going to be an interesting take. If that team wasn’t doing it, that would be something that I would have liked to adapt myself.

Video game movies have infamously been pretty bad for most of film history, but in the past couple years it seems like they’re turning a corner. Do you have any ideas as to why that might be?

What I wanted to do with this film wasn’t a direct adaptation or translation of the video game into a movie. My philosophy was about blurring the lines between what the movie and video game mediums are doing. There is a source material, but I wanted to shine a spotlight on the players playing the game or online streamers and the viewers who are watching. There are many layers. I wanted to take all of that and distill it into a movie.

Is part of the improvement in video game movies that the people making the movies are gamers themselves?

Since I can recall, like before I was born, there was a Nintendo right beside my bedside. So I think my growing up and video games have always been linked on some level. I would say the same for our cast, like [lead actor] Kazunari Ninomiya. Every time we would cut on a shot, he would pull out his smartphone and start gaming. There’s a very high literacy across the entire team in terms of what video games are and how we interact with them in our society.

What was that set like? It seems like one of those things that seems simple — because it’s just a hallway — but was probably really complicated.

We actually created two identical corridors as if it were a copy-and-paste-type situation. So we had a very, very long and skinny set. The cast and crew would often get lost, so we named one of the sets “Hitchcock” and one of the sets “Kubrick.” A lot of those long cuts that you’re seeing in the film are very long, and you can’t tell where it’s been edited because we physically looped in this corridor using practical analog techniques.

Before I let you go, is there anything else you want to say about Exit 8 that you haven’t been asked about yet?

I want to know what type of audience is going to watch this film. I made it specifically with movie theaters in mind. I think with our modern-day smartphone culture, we’ve forgotten and lost the ability to wait and think and imagine something because it’s just at our fingertips, and we can scroll away so fast. Being in an environment where we’re forced to watch this screen and almost predict and want to engage with it — I’m curious as to how different audiences and cultures are going to experience it.

Exit 8 opens in U.S. theaters April 10.