Film adaptations of video games often expand on the source material to create a compelling narrative, but few do so with the deliberate, meta-textual philosophy of “Exit 8.” In an exclusive discussion, director Genki Kawamura reveals how he transformed a minimalist indie horror game into a cinematic exploration of guilt and purgatory, all while intentionally blurring the lines between the mediums of film and interactive entertainment. This deep dive into the movie-making process uncovers the inspirations from Dante to daily commutes, and the unique challenge of giving a silent game character a profound cinematic backstory.
From Game to Film: Creating a Character from Purgatory
The original “Exit 8” game presents players with a stark, looping maze of white corridors, tasking them with finding visual anomalies to escape. It is a pure, psychological experience devoid of character or explicit plot. For writer-director Genki Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase, this blank slate was the starting point. They needed to invent a protagonist whose inner turmoil could justify the world literally warping around him. The result is The Lost Man, played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a commuter trapped not just in a physical space but in a cycle of indecision after a life-altering phone call. Kawamura’s process involved watching “many, many streams of Exit 8” to understand how different players projected their own stories onto the game’s simple framework. This research, combined with reflections on the isolating nature of Tokyo commuting, led him to a classical concept: “I looked at Dante’s Divine Comedy, and this idea of Purgatory, where the characters have to face all the little sins they’ve ignored over time. And that was the origin point for inventing the story.”
Blurring the Mediums: Viewer as Player, Viewer as Audience
A core philosophy behind Kawamura’s adaptation was to challenge the conventional boundaries of storytelling between games and movies. He believes that video games as a source material present a unique challenge because “the player and the main character often overlap.” His goal was not a straight translation but a synthesis. Kawamura was inspired by a conversation with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto about how truly great games are fun for both the player and those watching. This idea directly influenced the film’s construction. “At times, I wanted to place the audience into the shoes of the player, but at other times, I placed the audience in the perspective of someone perhaps viewing a Twitch livestream,” Kawamura explains. This deliberate shift in perspective aims to make the viewer hyper-aware of the viewing experience itself, creating a meta-commentary on how we consume both games and their adaptations.
The Walking Man: From NPC to Central Figure
One of the film’s most significant expansions is the character of the Walking Man, a silent, recurring non-player character in the original game. Kawamura saw an opportunity to explore a profound relational concept. “In my world that I exist in, I’m the main character, and others might appear as NPCs,” he says. “But the opposite is also true — in others’ lives, I’m an NPC.” By developing the Walking Man’s own unnerving story arc, the film asks the audience to consider the subjectivity of experience and the hidden narratives of every person in our periphery. This approach not only adds narrative depth but also reinforces Kawamura’s theme of interconnected fates within a shared, hellish space.
The Influence of Japanese Animation on Live-Action Horror
Kawamura’s extensive background as a producer on landmark anime films like “Your Name” and “Suzume” fundamentally shaped his directorial approach to “Exit 8.” He points to the unique strengths of Japanese animation in visualizing internal states. “Japanese animation… is really, really good at manipulating time and exploring what happens within the human mind, and visualizing it, turning it into visual expression,” Kawamura notes. He cites masters like Hayao Miyazaki, Mamoru Oshii, and Satoshi Kon as influences in translating the game’s abstract psychological horror into a tangible, live-action environment. This animator’s sensibility allowed him to treat the sterile corridors not just as a setting, but as a direct manifestation of the protagonist’s fractured psyche, a common technique in the anime he helped produce.
Adaptation as Challenge and Opportunity
Having worked on major cross-medium projects, including the upcoming live-action “Your Name,” Kawamura views adaptation as a dual effort. “It’s both a challenge and an opportunity,” he states. The challenge lies in respecting the source material while fulfilling the narrative requirements of a new medium. The opportunity is to use the tools of film—performance, cinematography, structured plot—to explore questions the game could only imply. This process extended beyond the screenplay for Kawamura, who also wrote a novelization of “Exit 8” that delves even deeper into character backgrounds, showcasing a multi-platform approach to storytelling.
What Game Would Kawamura Adapt Next?
When asked about other video games he would like to adapt, Kawamura laughed and gave a telling answer: “I would’ve loved to have done Backrooms,” he said, referencing another viral horror concept of endless, liminal spaces. “But someone else already had that idea.” His choice reaffirms his fascination with minimal, psychologically potent game environments that serve as blank canvases for exploring deep human fears and anxieties, suggesting his future work may continue to mine this rich vein of interactive horror.
Ultimately, “Exit 8” stands as a testament to the creative possibilities that emerge when a director refuses to see hard lines between mediums. By fusing the immersive perspective of gaming with the character-driven narrative of film, and by infusing it all with the visual language of anime, Genki Kawamura has crafted a horror experience that is as much about how we tell stories as it is about the terror of being trapped. The film, now in theaters, invites audiences to confront their own small sins while contemplating the very lenses through which we view our realities and the people we perceive as mere background characters in our lives.
