Hallowatch 2026 No. 1: Exit 8 (2025)
31 Days of Halloween! 31 Movies! These will be shorter than the My Year of Shakespeare posts!
I'm going to be watching one horror movie per day that I haven't seen, each from a different year (going backwards one year at a time). This is to prevent my Hallowatch from falling into the "yeah I guess I would like to watch every Michael Myers Halloween movie" trap that I've fallen into the last couple years. These may mention some plot details; I'm not going to be doing "can you BELIEVE when OBVIOUS SPOILER happened" but I'm not going to shy away from discussing the plot either; read what you feel is appropriate with that knowledge.
I'll also be doing a sketch for each.
Today we're watching Exit 8.
[Wikipedia; plot summary contains spoilers]
While on a subway, The Lost Man (only name given) receives a call from his ex-girlfriend, who informs him she is pregnant and asks him what to do. The Lost Man, attempting to exit the subway at the same time, ends up in a maze of twisty passages, almost all alike. He reads the "rules" on the entrance of the tunnel - if you see an anomaly, turn back; otherwise, proceed forward. He encounters a series of anomalous and non-anomalous tunnels, with the anxiety of "spotting the anomaly" and "what will the anomaly be" providing much of the tension.
I was apprehensive coming in to this as my major previous experience with J-Horror was リング when I was 14 or 15 and in a Japanese 1 class; I really enjoyed how it was able to access Terror — not just Spooky, not just Tense or Anxious, not just Revolting, but white-knuckle, purely-reacting Terror — with its build and reveal. I went in expecting something similar from this. Not so! While this does aim for some elements of anxiety, it feels like a weirdly sentimental or moralistic movie, in a similar vein to an M Night Shyamalan movie like The Sixth Sense or Signs. There are some spooky, tense, and revolting parts (including on-screen vomiting, for my emetophobic friends). I enjoyed the aspect of "can you spot the anomaly", which felt very video game-y (this is based on The Exit 8); the pregnancy plot, I don't know, I feel like Japanese media shoehorns a lot of pregnancy anxiety into its productions due to anxiety over the country's declining birth rate. Maybe there's a better way to address this, perhaps via providing material support to new parents, rather than include Pregnancy Thoughts in every piece of media made.
My first time through with this was sans subtitles, due to an issue with my Idiosyncratic Bespoke Solution [IBS] for watching movies; it still largely works without knowing Japanese, in part due to extremely broad moods telegraphed by its actors, its score (Ravel's "Bolero"), and a few more obvious anomalies to start us off. A second watch with this corrected confirmed the "I'm pregnant, what should we do" conversation at the beginning.
Strong recommend, especially if you've wanted to dip your toe in on J-Horror without losing sleep. A really quite gorgeous movie also - the black/white/yellow motif is very nice to look at.
