If there’s one thing that’s in vogue right now, it’s videogame adaptations. And if there are two things that are in vogue right now, then that’d be videogame adaptations and horror movies. With that in mind, prolific indie outfit Neon — of Keeper, Longlegs, Cuckoo, and Presence fame — may be onto a winner with Exit 8, Your Name producer turned writer-director Kawamura Genki’s J-Horror take on Kotake Create’s eerie 2023 walking simulator. Starring Kazunari Ninomiya (Letters From Iwo Jima), Genki’s movie — like the game — follows a man trapped in a seemingly endless Japanese metro station passageway, desperately trying to find his way to, well, Exit 8. Liminal space lovers, take a look at the trailer below — and for everyone else, abandon all hope, ye who enter here;
Rule 1: If you find an anomaly turn back immediately. Rule 2: If you do not find any anomalies do not turn back. Rule 3: Do not overlook any anomalies. These are the rules that governed The Exit 8 game, and these are the rules our poor protagonist must follow if he’s to have any hope of escaping his underground nightmare. It’s a deceptively simple set-up, but one that, as this first Exit 8 trailer shows, holds a lot of horror potential. Marrying the nightmare logic of The Shining with something akin to The Backrooms, Exit 8‘s teaser does a solid job of showing the psychological effect of the metro’s maddening loop while offering flashes of the terrors Ninomiya’s protagonist will face, including bleeding walls, crashing waves, creepy men, and — by the looks of it — the physical manifestation of some deep-rooted childhood trauma. Yippee!
The official synopsis for the movie — which also stars Yamato Kôchi, Naru Asanuma, Kotone Hanase, and Nana Komatsu — reads: “A man trapped in an endless sterile subway passageway sets out to find Exit 8. The rules of his quest are simple: do not overlook anything out of the ordinary. If you discover an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you don’t, carry on. Then leave from Exit 8. But even a single oversight will send him back to the beginning. Will he ever reach his goal and escape this infinite corridor?”
Already a major hit in Genki and co-writer Kentaro Hirase’s native Japan, as well as a favourite with the midnight madness crowd at international film festivals all over last year, there’s a lot of hype surrounding Exit 8‘s long-awaited release. For stateside horror hounds, you can look forward to seeing this one in cinemas on 10 April. Here in the UK, distributors are clearly still trapped in the metro on their way to bringing Exit 8 into our cinemas — but we’ll let you know when a release date drops.
