Indie Horror Games Are Invading Hollywood, and They Have the Fans to Thank For It

Watching a streamer find their way through the digital labyrinth of some spooky game—particularly one with lots of jumpscares—can be as entertaining as playing the game yourself, and it’s that push and pull between being a player and an observer that has surely fed into the moment that indie horror games are having lately. Streamers and their fans have driven a number of projects made by small game studios to internet virality, and the movie studios have followed, looking towards these very games and their built-in fanbases to find cinema’s next big thing.

It’s a unique type of collective experience, and exactly the phenomenon that Genki Kawamura, director of the horror adaptation Exit 8, tried to capture with his film.

Kawamura recently told me in a Zoom interview that he played the game as soon as it came out, only to later discover its growing army of fans: “I began to watch a lot of different streamers playing the game, and I realized there were as many different stories and interactions with the game as there were people playing it.”

Exit 8 is by no means the only movie to come out of the recent indie horror game boom. Just in the past six months, we’ve had a Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel, the latest installment in the giant franchise about killer animatronic animals that house the ghosts of murdered children; an adaptation of Iron Lung, the sci-fi submarine sim first made famous by streamer Markiplier, who also directed and starred in the movie; and an adaptation of The Mortuary Assistant, the extremely streamer-friendly horror game where the player takes on the role of a rookie embalmer stuck in a morgue with at least one demonically possessed corpse. Soon to come is A24’s Backrooms, based on a popular liminal space creepypasta that has already received numerous video game adaptations.

Exit 8 the movie is based on the similarly titled game The Exit 8. It has a deceptively simple premise. The player finds themself trapped in a single endlessly repeating hallway somewhere in a Japanese subway station, through which they must walk eight times while successfully noting any “anomalies” they see—that is, anything that looks different or out of place. Or downright terrifying, in some cases. It’s a walking simulator, so all you can really do is go back and forth as many times as the game forces you to, which, for Kawamura, made the process of finding the “plot” of the movie somewhat easier.

“I felt that the main character of the film was, perhaps not our human characters, but the corridor itself,” he explained, comparing the aesthetic to Dante’s Divine Comedy. “While in this purgatory, this very white, sanitized corridor, we see a lot of the guilt and the small sins that we commit every day within our mind projected into the external world. The ‘EXIT 8’ sign within the corridor almost feels like this divine creature governing this domain, watching a lot of different humans enter its space, playing different versions of the game and facing their own sins and their own [guilt] in their own way. Which is why none of the characters in the film have a name. I want them to feel like NPCs entering this game that’s being governed by this sign.”

The film’s opening even turns the audience into NPCs, switching from a first-person perspective, almost as if you’re watching it through a VR headset, to third person in its first few minutes. “I wanted to put the audience into the shoes of the player, but at times I wanted the audience to feel like they were watching someone else stream a video game,” Kawamura said. “Some of the inspiration came from when I had a talk with [game designer] Miyamoto Shigeru about 10 years ago, and Miyamoto Shigeru said that with really great games it’s obvious that the players are going to have a lot of fun, but the people watching the players and the game screen should equally have as much fun.”

What is it that makes games like Exit 8, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Iron Lung and the rest so popular? Many of them are just job simulators, but they’re job simulators with a twist. The player is given an odd yet mundane task, the task inevitably goes wrong, and the player has to follow the rules of the game’s world to survive. Paradoxically, this constrained mode of storytelling means the world is more open for exploration. In The Mortuary Assistant, every playthrough is different—the game is procedurally generated, so while the general bones are the same, players will see different things based on how they choose to play.

“I made sure that each playthrough gave you different story events, and you got different haunt events throughout,” Brian Clarke, who designed The Mortuary Assistant and co-wrote the film (and appears in a cameo), explained to me. “I think that also drove [the popularity of it], because then suddenly there was this, like, ‘Well, what else could there be? Is there another thing I haven’t seen? This person saw this thing, and I never saw that.’”

Clarke first released the game as a mostly plotless prototype with detailed depictions of the embalming process, and paid a lot of attention to what his first round of players said they expected to be in the next version: “I put the demo out the same way, and again I listened to the audience and saw what they liked, what they didn’t like. I didn’t let it drive my design and drive what my game is, but I kept it in mind as I was making stuff.”

In other words, the collaboration, the incentive to be involved in the process, was there for the players from the beginning. There’s a unique connection, a sense of collective ownership, that fans have to the indie stuff, the stuff that doesn’t have the guaranteed hype promised by a giant studio with a ton of ad money. Five Nights at Freddy’s has a lively fanbase churning out art, merch, and intensive YouTube deep dives into the lore of the games even now. It was the fans that ensured Markiplier’s Iron Lung movie got a theatrical run, calling their local multiplexes and asking for screenings. It was the streamers that turned The Mortuary Assistant into a social media phenomenon with video excerpts of players shrieking at reanimated corpses jumping from the shadows.

“I didn’t build for it,” Clarke acknowledged, “but I knew that, ‘Okay, this moment will capture as a clip really well.’”

It’s not all clips and jumpscares, though. The Mortuary Assistant also has a compelling plot—an embalmer must find a corpse-possessing demon and ritually banish it before it possesses her—that was a boon for director Jeremiah Kipp, who was immediately drawn to the game’s “cinematic” storytelling elements. “These games are able to give you that moment to moment entertainment value,” said Kipp. “But then they give you something more, which is an enriching experience that makes you think about deeper subjects.”

The Mortuary Assistant, at its heart, is about death, and why death scares us, and how we choose to deal with that fear. You could say the same thing about any of these other games that use a spooky aesthetic or a well-timed jumpscare to spin stories about unquiet spirits, liminal purgatories, and oceans of blood hiding monsters in their depths.

“Right now I feel like the indie horror game space is teeming with ideas, and people are grabbing these IPs and pulling them into movies because they’re wonderful stories, they’re relatable stories,” Kipp said. “If they scare us and they make us think about some of the stuff we might not otherwise like to think about, then that’s a wonderful tale indeed.”

However they go about doing it, these games and their films prod at something primal within all of us, inviting us to face our deepest fears again and again. Or watch a livestream of someone else doing it instead.