‘Exit 8’

Genki Kawamura’s film Exit 8 (2025) is a psychological horror about a man who is stuck in an endlessly looping subway corridor. It’s David Lynch meets The Shining meets M C Escher. The film is based on the computer game The Exit 8.

Exit 8 is a so-called ‘liminal space’ horror. The sub-genre has become a meme in 2026 with the release Backrooms. A liminal space is a place that people pass through on their way to somewhere else. These are typically anonymous corridors in public areas. They operate as ‘portals’ into another reality. They are psychologically charged and present the protagonist with a surreal, labyrinth-like puzzle to escape from. They may be an ordinary place, transformed by time, an empty school during the summer vacation, a hotel in the off-season, or a closed down shopping mall. The atmosphere is one of claustrophobia and being locked in. The space symbolically expresses the protagonist’s mind, their memories, and inner trauma.

The liminal space has been around for a long time – the creepy swimming pool in Cat People (1942), the bombed city at night in The Third Man (1949), the zone in Stalker (1979), the empty streets of Vivarium (2019), the weird purgatory world of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), episodes of Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone, and Severance, computer games like Silent Hill (1999) and, perhaps most famously, the hotel corridors of Kubrick’s The Shining. These places all share the same surreal and uncanny psychogeography.

Exit 8 fuses multiple horror sub-genres, from surrealism, to the ‘locked in’ story and the repeated loop story structure of films like Groundhog Day (1993). It uses horror to expresses an experience of modern life – the doom loop of endless scrolling, the personal isolation of noise cancelling headphones – the anxiety of feeling disconnected from the world around us, and from ourselves.

‘Widow’s Bay’

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Widow’s Bay (Season 1) is a horror comedy set on the fictional New England island of Widow’s Bay. The show has similarities to Lost – it features people who are stuck on an island that appears to be a focus for supernatural forces beyond their control.

Matthew Rhys is well cast as the town’s mayor along Kate O’Flynn as his assistant. There is a charming quirkiness in the first four episodes where the comedy horror is played straight. The audience is unsure if the ‘dark forces’ are real or imagined. Then the story moves into more of a straight horror drama.

The production values, performances and writing has been excellent. The writer’s appear to have moved the dramatic climax forward, into episodes 5,6, 7, and 8, with episodes 9 and 10 settling back into something of an end of season lull.

There’s a lot going on in this season – a struggling mayor keeping the island’s tourist attractions open (very much like the mayor in Jaws), a visit to the island’s dark historical past, a Halloween meets It Follows chase episode, a variety of monsters and creepy apparitions, a drug experience episode, the theme of a father struggling to have a meaningful relationship with his son, and interactions of an eccentric group of unlikely buddies (a ‘band of heroes’) fighting for their friends and the island’s community.

It will be interesting to see where the writers take Widow’s Bay in Season 2. I can see it turning into a quirky soap opera meets Stranger Things for adults.

‘Audition’

Audition is a novel by Katie Kitamura. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and it was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

The story – written in first person, past tense – explores the narrator’s experience of being an actress, a wife, and a ‘mother’. The stage and thespian world are used as a backdrop to the explain the disconnected happenstance, the acted out ‘unreality’ of the real world. Stage craft is contextualised with people acting out their relationships.

At first, I was expecting more of a plotted drama, but then I realised that this is a literary fiction experience that’s primarily about nuance and the nature of existence. The story is framed through the woman’s encounter with a young man who claims to be her son – even though she knows that he’s lying. He inserts himself into her life in an act of ‘brood parasitism’, appearing like a cuckoos egg in a warbler’s nest.

The stranger as ‘kin’ scenario is a literary metaphor for the close distance of relationships, where people are intimate with one another and yet emotionally detached.

‘Flesh’

David Szalay’s Flesh won the 2025 Booker Prize. The title Flesh conjures up nihilism or hedonism, neither of which particularly appeals to me. So, it’s taken a while to overcome that barrier and read the novel. Flesh is not nihilist or hedonistic. And much of the commentary about the novel gets it wrong. Reviews have focused on the ‘minimalistic’ prose, the overly ‘passive’ protagonist, and the frequent use of one word dialogue, like ‘okay’ and ‘yeah’.

After reading the novel, I can say that the text does have some elaborate prose, so it’s not as minimalist as people might imagine. And when the flourishes happen they feel slightly incongruous next to the sparse dialogue, but it does provide a contrast. The accusation of the story having a ‘passive’ protagonist is a bit weird. The protagonist is an ordinary man, a ‘regular guy’ with faults. He is unlucky in some ways, lucky in others. He has anger management issues and he doesn’t appear to be in touch with himself. He’s traumatised by life. The one word dialogue does become repetitive, even if it’s there to illustrate human disconnection.

The long time span, aspects of the prose style, and the use of condensed vignettes reminds me of Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13. The sexual and self-discovery dimension has echoes of Stephen Vizinczey’s novel In Praise of Older Women (which is also about the life of Hungarian man). One final comparison is the human journey in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So, what is Flesh? It’s the story of a man’s life, from adolescence to middle age. The narrative provokes questions about life choices and living a meaningful life.

The overnight story

Eyes Wide Shut

The overnight story is a journey into a strange land. It’s the same place as the daylight world but magically transformed by darkness into a new reality. This shadow world has its own rules and possibilities. It’s a place where the protagonists will face their fears. They will encounter wonderful, strange – and often terrifying – characters. They will be forced into a new understanding of reality. The compressed format of the overnight story works perfectly in films. It’s less optimised for the expansiveness of novels.

Time is ticking. As surely as day turns to night, dawn will arrive in the morning. The protagonist must survive the night. And, if they have a quest – they must achieve it before sunrise.

In the overnight story, adolescents will find meaning, love and friendship in films like The Myth of the American Sleepover, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, and American Graffiti. Monsters will emerge in Night of the Living Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn. A hostage crisis will be resolved in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and Die Hard. A traitor will be avenged in The Long Goodbye. An unpalatable truth will emerge in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Enemies will be defeated in The Warriors. A safe middle-class existence will be turned upside down in After Hours and Eyes Wide Shut. The occupants of a police station will survive the night in Assault on Precinct 13.

When morning comes, the world will be the same again, but the protagonists will be changed forever.