Exit 8 director Genki Kawamura says he wanted the upcoming horror film to blur the lines between movie and video game.
“So when this game came out, people were playing the game on streaming,” Kawamura explains to GamesRadar+. “I was very impressed with the overall game design. But I also watched a lot of different streamers. And because the game is so simple, it served as this backdrop, and there were as many stories in there as there were players and videos on stream. So I thought that this game almost served as a device to explore something much more human.”
The Exit 8 is a 3D walking simulator where the player is stuck in a loop inside the Japanese metro and has to pass through several corridors in order to reach the final exit. It functions a little bit like a spot-the-difference game where the player must identify anomalies in each corridor: if there are none, the player can proceed toward the next exit. If there is one, the player must walk back the way they came… or be set back to Exit 0.
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In the movie adaptation, a young man, known only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) learns that his girlfriend is pregnant and panics at the idea of becoming a father. He gets off the train and finds himself lost in an endlessly looping corridor. Much like the game, The Lost Man must proceed to Exit 8 by identifying the anomalies in each corridor, or be sent back to the very beginning. And some of the anomalies are, uh, terrifying. The film became the first video game adaptation to ever screen at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and currently sits at a near-perfect 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.
“I think video games are amazing in their own right. There are many people who play them, many people involved in the development of them,” Kawamura continues. “But looking at Exit 8, this was developed by a single person, a twenty-six-year-old kid based in Kyoto… Kotake Create [is the] company. But I think because a single person saw it from end to end, the vision is very, very clear. It was almost like you’re looking at fine art or a novel. There was something very inventive and knew about it, and it was a very direct reflection of the creator’s vision.”
“And when making a movie, I think that’s what we really want to see. And I wanted to replicate that with Exit 8 in a way. I wanted to reinvent sort of the movie format, if you will. So instead of looking at this as a video game, adapted into a movie, I thought of it almost as well… we want to create a brand new experience where the borders between the movie and game mediums are blurred.”
Exit 8 releases in theaters on April 10 in the US and in the UK on April 24. For more, check out our list of upcoming video game movies.
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