Exit 8 director Genki Kawamura says the inspiration for the horror film's unique sound design comes from none other than 1980's The Shining.
"I paid a lot of respect to Stanley Kubrick and The Shining in this film," Kawamura tells GamesRadar+. "And when [Danny] goes down the corridor in the tricycle, there was a different sound the tricycle made when it was on wood versus when it was on the carpet. I think that level of difference really kind of gets under our skin and mentally kind of like corners us, which is what I wanted to do."
The movie, based on the indie horror video game of the same name, follows a young man, known only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) who learns that his girlfriend is pregnant and panics at the idea of becoming a father. When he gets off the train, he 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. He comes into contact with a little boy known simply as The Boy (Naru Asanuma), and the two decide to figure out the puzzle together.
The corridors of Exit 8 are not unlike the hallways of The Overlook Hotel in The Shining, and you could even go as far as to say that the character of The Boy is a much more demure (and possibly even a little bit sadder) Danny Torrance. When The Boy is walking through the corridors, the sound his shoes make is a very different sound from that of The Lost Man. The character of The Walking Man (who can also be seen in the video game) also has his own creepy footsteps, differentiating between his human and NPC (Non Player Character) forms. Kawamura explains that all of these effects were done with great purpose... and that they even held "auditions" for certain shoes.
"The shoes… The Walking Man is an NPC [in the film]," Kawamura explains (and I won't give much more context so that you can go see the film for yourself!) "When he's first walking through the corridor as an NPC, he's supposed to act like this CG type of character. And when he's walking through the corridor as a human, we actually used different shoes to get the squeaks. So it was a crazy thing: 'Well, what kind of shoe represents a CG character, an NPC, and what kind of shoe squeak represents a human?' But it's that level of detail that I think really comes across because the film is so simple, it takes place in such a liminal space."
Continues Kawamura: "We actually had a shoe audition. So our Foley artist brought like 40 different shoes [to figure out] what sound would be the best type of emotion we wanted to convey."
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.
