[COLUMN] Exit 8, Backrooms, and Gen Z's Liminal Horror | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Exit 8, the Japanese horror film that released in American theatres this weekend. I very much enjoyed it as a tight and efficient surrealist horror film - I’d go so far as to call it Exit Gr-8. But just a head’s up in case you want to go in completely blind.

Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 focuses on an anonymous protagonist (Kazunari Ninomiya) trapped in a seemingly unending subway corridor, where he is confronted with variations of the same corridor over and over and over again. In order to escape, he must correctly navigate the same corridor eight times, pressing forward if it is correct and turning back if he encounters “anomalies.” If he makes a mistake, the counter resets to zero.

As that summary suggests, Exit 8 is an adaptation of a popular independent horror game. It is clearly identifiable as such, with the reset functionality and the eight iterations that the character has to navigate. That said, eight is a very important number in Japanese culture associated with prosperity and even in western culture it neatly evokes the infinity symbol. Still, the film works on its own terms and makes sense in the broader culture of contemporary culture.

There have been a host of recent films and television shows based around this concept of a liminal space. Kane Parson is adapting his YouTube horror Backrooms into a feature film about a furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who discovers a door at the back of his shop that opens into an impossibly expansive series on unending corridors. Midway through the first season of Chainsaw Man, the characters find themselves stuck on the infinite and recursive eighth floor of a hotel.

In the video game adaptation Until Dawn, a group of characters find themselves trapped in a remote bed and breakfast forced to live the same night over and over again. In the television series FROM, characters find themselves trapped in a small town where every road out inevitably leads back in again. There are also shades of it to the labyrinth of strange interconnected corridors that the staff find themselves navigating in Severance.

It might even be possible to stretch this definition to include other recent horror movies. The entirety of the movie undertone, for example, takes place inside an eerie house that is constantly framed to feel both expansive and claustrophobic, with voyeuristic shots through doorways that emphasize mirrors and French doors in a way that makes the space feel impossibly large and incredibly contained. Iron Lung follows a main character (Markiplier) trapped inside a one-person submarine.

Obviously, there have been movies like this before. Groundhog Day popularized the idea of the time loop movie, and it has seen a recent resurgence with films like Palm Springs or Happy Death Day. There are plenty of genre films and shows in which characters find themselves trapped in a confined or uncanny location, from Vincenzo Natali’s Cube to Robert Rodriguez’s Predators to the television series LOST. Still, this feels pronounced enough in recent media to be a clear trend.

It is worth acknowledging that several of these projects are based on video games: Exit 8, Until Dawn, Iron Lung. This makes a certain amount of narrative sense. In purely pragmatic terms, the infinite pre-programmed loop is just the conversion of a video game mechanic into a narrative device. These movies tend to feel like video games, with the characters either advancing or starting over, and the loop becomes a way of building that into the premise.

However, it is also worth acknowledging that not every video game adaptation employs a mechanic like this. It is not part of the recent Super Mario Galaxy Movie. It has not been part of any Mortal Kombat adaptation to date. As such, including that mechanic is a narrative choice, as is choosing to adapt games that depend on it. It seems likely that those games resonate in part because their dependence on that mechanic resonates.

It is also worth acknowledging that these projects tend to skew younger. Iron Lung and Backrooms are both movies directed by YouTubers. The production team on Chainsaw Man were very young - Tatsuki Fujimoto was only 27 years old when he published the manga, and the choice was made to put younger talent in charge of the anime. These are largely projects by young people, for young people. They speak to some shared experience among young people.

As an aside, it is worth celebrating this as an idea unto itself. Like the reinvention of the romantic comedy in movies like The Drama or Materialists, this feels like an attempt to rework familiar genres in ways that resonate with younger audiences. There is plenty of proof that young people actually love going to the cinema when there are films that they want to see. There is statistical evidence – borne out by box office receipts – that young people love horror movies.

It makes sense that the general logic and mood of these films and shows taps into something that resonates with the lived experience of these younger audiences. While some of these films predate the pandemic and the lockdowns - Lorcan Finegan’s Vivarium, for example – this emphasis on liminal spaces cannot help but speak to young people’s memories of living through that uncertain time; trapped in family homes or hotels or small towns.

There is an existential horror underlying this that bleeds through in films like Exit 8 or Until Dawn, stories of characters seemingly trapped alone in a confined space, while also expected to somehow keep moving forward within it, to create the illusion of momentum or movement while stuck in place. There is a real sense that the younger generation has not yet fully recovered from the trauma of that experience, and culture’s unwillingness to talk about it cannot be making things easier.

With this in mind, it makes sense that breathing is a recurring anxiety within so many of these projects. The trapped-in-a-submarine movie is quite literally called Iron Lung. The anonymous protagonist of Exit 8 not only has to worry about drowning in a mysterious flood, but he also suffers from asthma. His panicked breathing is one way that the film generates suspense. It is also worth noting that the film ends with the character on his way to a hospital.

That said, it is perhaps trite to pin all of this on displaced anxiety resulting from the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown. These films tap into other latent fears that resonate with younger audiences. Gen Z is, after all, a generation raised in the ultimate uncanny liminal space, the internet. The internet is a vast and perhaps infinite pool of constantly shifting data and connections, where nothing is truly permanent and even the most mundane images cannot be trusted.

What are the liminal spaces of Exit 8 or Backrooms if not literal expressions of the most basic form of creepypasta, a word that is a corruption of copy-paste, itself an expression of the internet’s tendency to just get clogged up with repetitive nonsense that occasionally degrades and corrupts? The subway corridor in Exit 8 is quite literally copy-and-pasted, with occasional “anomalies” creeping in. The endless corridors in The Backrooms are seemingly just repeated corrupted patterns.

Dan Olsen described the aesthetic of the Metaverse as “a dead mall”, and these uncanny liminal spaces are perhaps a literalization of that, a corruption of the now-long-gone third places like malls where people could just hang out in person. Exit 8 opens with a first-person perspective shot of the lead character scrolling Twitter, travelling the subway with his headphones in. He is already in his own pocket universe of infinite scroll; infinite stroll feels like an organic escalation.

The phone is a recurring preoccupation within Exit 8, ironically both as a connection to and a distraction from the outside world. Our protagonist screens his calls, swipes on trains, listens to music and pays at vending machines all through his phone. The phone is a portal away from reality. Midway through the film, he recounts a key beat from the opening scene, in which an angry man (Hirota Ôtsuka) attacked a mother for failing to quiet her baby on the subway. “No one stood up for her,” the lead character observes. “They were all on their phones.”

There is a sense of existential loneliness permeating these films, the fear it is possible to be entirely alone within what should be a public space. This is part of the tension of undertone, in which the lead character (Nina Kiri) is a podcaster who speaks to the world on her weekly show, but lives alone with her dying mother (Michèle Duquet) in the old family home. Subway stations should be crowded, but instead the lead character finds himself completely alone within this eternal corridor.

There is a businessman (Yamato Kôchi) who walks by on each loop, but he never engages. He never says hello. If he acknowledges the lead character – whether by smiling at him or following him – it is an “anomaly”, a glitch in the fabric of reality. One of the clever twists of Exit 8 is the film’s suggestion that there are multiple characters trapped in this eternal cycle, but they are largely disconnected from each other even as they share what is ostensibly a public communal space.

This feels like an implicit critique of the alienating and dehumanizing effects of late capitalism. It is a surrealist extrapolation of the more mundane infinite loop of doing the same thing day in and day out: of riding subways that all look the same populated by men who all look the same and getting off them to walk through corridors that all look the same. At a certain point, even the days themselves start to all look the same.

The other person that the lead passes in the loop looks like a businessman, wearing a clean white shirt and carrying a briefcase. He could be a specter of an imagined future for the lead, an older man stuck in his own loop. “Everyday the crowded subway, everyday to work, doing the same thing every day,” taunts one anomaly (Kotone Hanase). “That’s hell.” That must be what a regular job looks like to Gen Z, given it no longer provides the stability of paying a mortgage or supporting a family.

Exit 8 suggests that, for the protagonist, life itself exists in a perpetual liminal state. Nothing is certain, even before he is trapped in the loop. The loop is a nightmarish manifestation of his everyday existence. At the start of the film, he receives a phone call from a woman (Nana Komatsu). He tells her that he is on the way to his “temp job.” She explains that they are “not really together.” Nothing is certain. Everything is fungible. There is no stability or consistency or reliability.

The laws that govern the social contract or interpersonal relationships have become abstracted and ambiguous. Nobody is sure who they are to anybody else. The basic structures of society have unraveled. In such a world, even trying to walk down a simple corridor becomes an exercise in trying to catch some signifier of the uncanny that may or may not be present. Even the mundane has become unknowable and alien, so navigating the world means keeping an eye out for anomalies.

All that said, it is worth positioning Exit 8 in the context of another recent popular subgenre. It is a film largely about parental anxieties. The movie starts with an argument over a baby on a train. The cries of a baby are a constant refrain within the maze. At one point, the lead encounters a small child (Naru Asanuma) that he has to protect and guide through the maze in a metaphor for parenting. When he panics, a hallucination of his partner assures him, in what feels like a thesis statement for the metaphor underpinning the movie, “No one knows which way is the right one.”

The phone call that sets off this panic attack of a movie involves the revelation that the lead character’s perhaps-girlfriend is pregnant. At a certain point, Exit 8 becomes about the impossibility of trying to navigate an irrational (and hostile) world while protecting a child. It’s not the most subtle metaphor for raising a child in the current moment, but it is effective, and it resonates with a wave of the year’s more interesting films tapping into the same basic anxieties: Hamnet, Die My Love, One Battle After Another, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Marty Supreme and undertone.

All of these various elements and contexts help to explain why these movies and shows about liminal spaces seem to resonate with younger audiences. They provide a surrealist and abstract framework to explore and interrogate these underlying fears. In the grand scheme of Gen Z cinema (“Gen Z-inema”, perhaps?), Exit 8 is anything but an anomaly.