Prediction in The Mortuary Assistant and Exit 8
Mark Fisher’s taxonomy of fear as described in his 2016 work of literary and film criticism, The Weird and the Eerie, has roots in early psychology and can be explained in detail by modern neuroscience. This framework can also be applied to the art of a good video game movie adaptation. It’s a bit of a twisted path, but I invite you to walk with me.
Failure to Live and Failure to Die
If you have ever been in a room with a dead body, you may be familiar with that creeping conviction that the deceased might suddenly open their eyes and start talking. I think this, and much of corpse-based horror in media, is rooted in what Fisher describes as The Eerie: fear born from a presence where you expect absence, or absence where you expect presence. The dead and their usual stomping grounds (cemeteries, morgues, etc.) do both of these things—your brain is unsettled by the absence of life, lack of movement, lack of warmth, and tries to fill in the gaps with all the little vital signs you’re used to. But then your rational mind, which knows dead things don’t move, gets freaked out by your own overactive amygdala.
The Mortuary Assistant, both the 2022 video game and the 2026 movie adaption, employs this trick of psychology to unsettle you long before the demons show up.
The Gory Details
To briefly summarize: The Mortuary Assistant follows Rebecca Owens, a mortuary science graduate completing her residence at River Fields Mortuary, under the supervision of Head Mortician Raymond Delver. Her first night alone in the morgue becomes nightmarish as she discovers ritualistic evil just under the epidermis at River Fields.
The movie opens with close up shots of scalpels in dead flesh and tubes in arteries. When Rebecca wires shut the cadaver’s mouth, you are easily brought back to my experience playing the game, cringing at the crunching of setting needles piercing the jaw. This illustrates how a movie adaptation can also exploit the brain’s predictive capabilities: you are not only experiencing a violent form of The Eerie (failure of the body to express pain at being gored) in the present, but you are also remembering what it felt like to do the simulated goring.
Predicting Anomalies
Exit 8 and its mechanical predecessors (ex: I’m On Observation Duty) rely heavily on the same neural pathways. You play as a commuter trapped in an endlessly repeating Tokyo subway hall, a maze of white tile and fluorescent light. Each time you go through, there is a chance something will be wrong: one too many posters on the wall, a door handle where door handles typically don’t go, or, most obtrusively, a river of blood crashing through the halls. After enough loops, your perception of the scene becomes more than just what you see. Your brain begins to generate expectations about the hallway before you even turn the corner. And when something defies those expectations, it feels uncanny and threatening.
In Fisher’s taxonomy, this would be classified as The Weird: the presence of something that does not belong.
In neuroscience, this is an example of predictive coding, a theory that describes the way the brain creates generative models of the world around you, which get updated by the presence of “predictive errors,” or, as the game calls them, anomalies.
Bayesian inference, a theorem used to calculate probability, can describe what happens next. You start to guess where the anomalies might be. Players and movie protagonists alike are initially drawn to the most visually stimulating or visually distinct areas: the posters, the doors, the vents, The Walking Man. This is despite the fact that anything could change, as far as you know.
Then, when a particular anomaly occurs for the first time, its location gets updated in your mental model. Anomalies like the tiles changing color or texture or pattern put the empty floor and walls on the level as the posters and doors. As more anomalies are encountered, your assumptions about what matters in the environment gradually collapse, until even the most mundane details could register as threats.
Adaptation
2026’s Exit 8 makes the interesting choice to film the opening minutes in first person, like a video game cut scene. It’s interesting because the first few scenes are unique to the movie: the game never shows us the protagonist’s foreshadowed angst about life and fatherhood like the movie does. The simulation of gameplay ends right when the gameplay would have begun, when the endless hall is introduced. This, like those close up shots in Mortuary Assistant (2026) that mimic gameplay, feels like the movie’s attempt to gently transition the viewer’s expectations, paying homage to the original format before putting its own spin on things.
Those interstitials of medium activate a system of memory retrieval called “embodied simulation,” lighting up the parts of your brain that you used to play the game. Exit 8 waits for you to get comfortable feeling like you’re in the driver’s seat, before abruptly taking away the controls.
The Unheimlich
In the introduction The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher cites Freud’s essay on the unheimlich (little if any relation to the maneuver) as the source of his two analytical modes.
The unheimlich is the frightful, the uncanny, the unfamiliar lurking among the familiar (it is best translated from German as “the unhomely”). The concept is well explored by horror experts because it is so central to what makes us afraid. The stranger in our midst, the unaccountable call from the dark: these are primal and endlessly iterable human fears.
These fears are born of a failure to predict. Exit 8 and Mortuary Assistant are already good examples of horror that prey on that particular form of fear, as dichotomized by Fisher. Their recent movie adaptations are somewhat unique in the way they do the same thing, unmooring you from your mental models with choice cinematography.
None of this is to say that exploiting the viewers' predictive predilections makes a movie good. I certainly have my gripes with both films. But understanding how these games frighten us through multiple frameworks helps us understand how their adaptations can frighten us too, and differently.
