How ‘Exit 8’ Went From Indie Game to Hit Horror Movie in 18 Months

The Japanese indie video game “The Exit 8” takes place entirely in the hallway of a subway station, with only a simple set of rules. If you notice an anomaly, something out of place, you must turn around. If you don’t, keep walking forward. Choose the right path eight times in a row and you can leave the station through Exit 8.

To most, this may not sound like fertile cinematic ground. Filmmaker Genki Kawamura begs to differ.

“I recall playing the game almost immediately after it was released, and after playing the game, I watched a lot of different livestreams and archives,” Kawamura told TheWrap, translated from his native Japanese by an interpreter. “Because it’s such a simple game at its core, there were as many different experiences and stories as there were players and videos online.”

So Kawamura, co-writing with Kentaro Hirase, used the game to tell a story of his own, one inspired by Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Twitch livestreams, generative AI and a slew of other literary and real-world sources. Less than 18 months after the video game came out, Kawamura premiered his film (simply titled “Exit 8”) at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival to positive reviews. The low-budget psychological horror would premiere in Japan that August, opening to over $6 million at the box office.

Before Neon released the film in the United States on Friday, “Exit 8” had already made $39 million in international markets, grossing more than 10x its small budget at the global box office.

How did Kawamura turn a bare-bones video game into such a rapid box office hit? He simply didn’t shy away from what makes video games special.

“I wanted to add more layers and make the audience feel like they were watching a Twitch livestream at the same time,” Kawamura said. “I tried to capture the phenomenon that was happening in the video game industry at large — not just look at the source material, but how people were interfacing with this content and take all of that and translate it into a film.”

Enter: “The Exit 8”

You may not be familiar with Kotake Create. To date, the indie game developer has only released two games: “The Exit 8” and a follow-up, “Platform 8,” set entirely on a moving train.

Consisting of only a one-man development team, Kotake Create needed something small for its first solo foray into video games. The single subway tunnel “The Exit 8” takes place in is sparsely decorated with only a handful of signs, doors and vents, as well as a single man walking past the player (who becomes more menacing during certain anomalies).

“The Exit 8” takes inspiration from other short, surreal horror games like “I’m on Observation Duty” (another game where players search for anomalies) and “P.T.” (a playable teaser for a canceled “Silent Hill” installment directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro). “The Shining” also has a clear influence, as evidenced by one anomaly in which the subway tunnel floods with blood à la one of that film’s signature scenes.

“I felt that the corridor, throughout the development of this project, almost became the main character of the film. I think back to movies like ‘The Shining,’ where this giant lodge becomes the monster in the film and begins to take on a will of its own,” Kawamura said of his own take on Kotake Create’s material. “In a similar way, I think our corridor began to take on a will of its own, toying with humans, becoming a very, very scary entity. The yellow Exit 8 sign is almost this divine being overseeing its own domain. It becomes like this Hal type of character from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’”

For its small scale, the horror walking simulator became an unambiguous hit, one that inspired various other “8-like” games set in similar environments. It’s of a pair with other “liminal space horror,” or horror that takes place in surreal settings that feel just adjacent enough to reality to be creepy (audiences interested in that subgenre will have plenty to chew on in May with A24’s “Backrooms,” based on a series of internet stories and directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons).

When “Exit 8” launched on PS4 and PS5 in August 2024, Kotake Create announced that it had surpassed one million downloads on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. When the film adaptation released in Japan in August 2025, Playism (one of the game’s publishers) announced that the number of sales had doubled in the year since.

One of its early players was Kawamura himself.

“When I played the game, I was reset so many times. I remember getting very, very angry,” Kawamura laughed. “Perhaps my experience is closest to The Walking Man, which is how the game felt to me.”

Kawamura compared his team’s process creating the movie to that of a video game. The crew would use a small on-set editing bay to see how one loop of the corridor flowed into the next, re-writing and re-shooting on the spot if the footage didn’t work how they imagined. The film consists of only five actors, with Kazunari Ninomiya playing the central character (known only as The Lost Man).

“There was a very agile video game development type of pipeline that was happening on set,” Kawamura said. “It almost felt as though we were rendering in real time what the movie was supposed to be.”

Hitchcock and Kubrick

When Kawamura set out adapting “Exit 8,” he didn’t want to use any cheat codes. If the game was set entirely in a looping subway tunnel, then the movie would be too, only leaving the single location for a handful of shots.

He just had to figure out how to make that interesting.

“I imagined the outside every day,” the filmmaker laughed, speaking briefly in English. “It was very claustrophobic, and every day I was worried if we could withstand this runtime of 90 minutes just using one location. The film has 16 different scenes and basically one situation, so a lot of the crew came up to me and said, ‘Hey, is this movie really gonna be OK? I’m not sure about it,’ and I told them, ‘Look, don’t worry: I’m also not sure about it myself.’”

“Exit 8” marks only the second feature directed by Kawamura, who’s worked for a longer period of time as a screenwriter and a novelist. Though the video game has no story to speak of, Kawamura’s literary mind homed in on the purgatorial aspects of the walking simulator.

“That led me to draw parallels between that and Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’ this idea of purgatory where we see these very small moments of guilt and sin that we live with every day that are in our mind,” he said. “If it manifested itself and projected itself into our physical world, what would it look like?”

To capture this idea, Kawamura needed the audience to believe the film actually took place in a single, looping environment. Cinematographer Keisuke Imamura used unbroken shots as the Lost Man walks from one iteration of the hallway to the next to sell the idea that this was, indeed, an endless purgatory. On a practical level, that meant building two identical corridors, placed back-to-back, to shoot the film on.

The crew named one corridor Hitchcock, the other Kubrick.

“I wanted it to feel like something that was rendered out of a game engine. Trying to go for that visual expression using practical techniques also creates a very eerie type of feeling,” Kawamura said. “As much as possible, we didn’t want to use CG or VFX in this film.”

The crew would alter these individual corridors (or leave them untouched) as necessary for the story, with anomalies ranging from totally innocuous to utterly terrifying. Kawamura said this mechanic, baked into the game, makes the film more evocative of a Twitch stream, inviting the audience into the movie for a semi-interactive experience.

“When you’re watching a live stream, part of what makes it so much fun is you’re watching the player and the player’s reaction to what’s happening on the screen, but you’re also, in a way, playing the game with them,” he said. “In the film as well, there are instances where audiences might notice an anomaly first, and our characters in the film notice it after, or vice versa, the character notices something, and you’re left behind, but you catch up afterwards.”

An anomalous world

Genki Kawamura commutes every day on the Tokyo subway. As he stands in a crowded car, headed in the same direction as scores of strangers, he can’t help but still, somehow, feel isolated. Everyone lives in their own world, he said, glued to their phones, unobservant of their surroundings.

“Even within our cell phones, we scroll through timelines and see instances of violence or war, and we keep scrolling past it,” Kawamura said. “I think we’re living in a very selfish era, both on a micro level and a macro level. If you look at our current geopolitical landscape, I think you can kind of argue that we’re trending more towards a nation-first approach.”

This observation led to the first scene of “Exit 8,” where the Lost Man takes the subway to that fateful corridor, plugged into his own phone and trying to tune out the world around him. It’s not hard to see how a filmmaker concerned by this state of affairs would be drawn to a concept like “Exit 8’s.”

“I think we’re all guilty of scrolling past things — seeing it, but not truly seeing it. That, to me, is what anomalies are,” Kawamura said. “If these anomalies manifested themselves in this corridor and were reflected back upon us, how would we react as humans? Would we notice it, acknowledge it and then turn back, or ignore the anomaly and keep pressing forward? That, for me, was kind of the basis of designing the story in the film.”

Despite his practical solutions to the actual shooting of “Exit 8,” Kawamura wanted the film to feel influenced by this highly digital world. Set designers and actors alike were instructed to lean into the uncanny valley to make even the most mundane elements feel, in some way, anomalous.

“The direction I gave (Yamato Kochi, the Walking Man) was to actually walk as though he were animated in CG and smile as though Gen AI created the smile. I think blurring those borders, by doing something inherently digital using analog means and live-action actors, puts us intentionally into this uncanny valley that feels very, very creepy.”

In general, Kawamura pointed to generative AI as an influence on the film — not necessarily as a positive inspiration so much as an example of how fragmented and individual the world is becoming.

“While developing and producing this film, I remember scrolling through my smart phone, and there was a lot of Gen AI content that made it onto my timeline,” he said. “Looking at how AI interprets and regurgitates humans, spaces, different liminal spaces, I think there’s always this weird signature fingerprint that tips me off.”

“That uncanny valley creepiness was something that really inspired me for the look of ‘Exit 8,’ so in a really roundabout way, I’m thankful for Gen AI and what it’s done in terms of inspiring me.”

“Exit 8” is in theaters now.

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