Sixteen Continued Screams For Halloween: Day 4 (Exit 8)

 To close out our little trilogy of liminal horror inspired by Internet shit, we have this. Right away we require extra context, as once again I myself am trapped within these hellish hallways. Exit 8 is a spooky video game wherein you are stuck in a stark white underground subway corridor, and you have to attempt to spot minute differences in the architecture 8 times in a row to get out. Failure resets you back to the beginning, and so you must remain attentive to detail and hyperfocus on damn near everything in this liminal space. I actually streamed this game once, and only once. What followed was one of the most hellish streams I have ever endured. Even though it was only 90 minutes or so, I did not escape the hallway. In some regards, I'm still in there. I faltered miserably at it, and that led me to get inside my head as I so often do. Anxious feelings of being utterly horrible at streaming, at entertaining, at being a supposed hard game beater. Add to that the fact that staring at the same shit for so long actually gave me an ocular migraine, a giant floating blurry spot at the center of my vision due to overexerting my eyes trying to spot the differences. As a final indignance, I was raided twice by pals. I would welcome such joys for a fun stream, but it almost never happens. The one time it happens twice and it's during the worst moment of my goddamn playing games for the Internet life. Exit 8 was my sworn enemy from then on.

Then they made a fucking movie out of it. You sick sons of bitches. So here I fucking am again, talking about this godforsaken shit, thrown right the fuck back into this nightmarish liminal space. You'd think I'd be madder about that, but let's turn down the performative outrage and simmer back to our usual levels. I'm watching a bunch of other people fight and struggle to find Exit 8 now, instead of suffering myself. Also I'm in the privacy of my own home, watching on my own time, and not trying and failing to do it in front of all my Internet friends. Oh, the final truth of the matter: it was all in my head, anyway. The judging and shame and all that. They don't give a shit that I was shit at the game. They just wanted me to hydrate and do better. Alright, now that we have that settled, the motion picture. How do you make a movie out of trying to find the difference in a liminal space eight times in a row?

You make some of the differences glaringly obvious horror movie jumpscares, and also layer the movie with big honking subtext. This made me just a little salty. Here I was burning my eyes out hyperfixating on posters, and these assholes turn a corner and the walls start bleeding or a loud noise starts blaring or the hallway starts flooding like the elevator from The Shining just opened. Why couldn't I have had an easier time? Though I did find it very cute how the first thing that the protagonist tries is taking pictures of everything with his phone, only for the photos to delete upon the next loop. Very cute indeed. The hallway is just as you know it from the game, starkly lit and filled with those signifiers that need to be observed. Counting them off like a checklist becomes a repeated mantra, once that you settle into as you watch the film. It's a real hoot to notice some of the anomalies before the protagonists do, and to yell at the screen for them to turn back because you caught one and they didn't.

As for that big honking subtext... the anxiety and worries about men becoming fathers. It's just right there on the screen, from the first scenes of the movie when the protagonist fails to intervene on the train when a man is bitching at a woman whose baby is crying. Then he learns that he himself is going to be a father, and immediately is stuck in the liminal space. There's some other contrasts between fathers, like the walking man who we see subsumed by the loop, and the child found inside the maze who may or may not be the protagonist's future child. It is at once a blindingly obvious metaphor, and one that doesn't appear at first glance to map on to spotting differences in a liminal space. Still, it's my job to reach and try to connect them, so let me try to do that now. Being trapped in the maze is to be trapped in the repetition of the daily commute. Breaking out requires one to be attentive, observant, and not slip back into old habits. The addition of the child also is the difference between protagonists. The walking man abandons the child to save himself, and is lost in the routine forever. Our main protagonist does not, and it eventually gets him out of there and back to the world, a better man, ready to accept responsibility. It's deliberately making the choice to observe your surroundings and accept change. Or something. I may be reaching there. In any case, this is not a bad little film! 

Now that we're out of liminal horror, let's have some shorter fare.