Pulse (AKA: "Kairo" in the original Japanese) was one of the highlights of the early 2000s supernatural J-horror boom. It was up there with The Grudge and The Ring as movies so terrifying they could not help but cross the Pacific. Most of those movies made it over here in the form of remakes. Pulse got a remake in 2006 - a movie I saw and have since completely forgotten about, but vaguely remember it being fucking terrible and so have no curiosity in revisiting it. The far superior Japanese Pulse has unfortunately ended up a bit underrated. The Weinsteins did all they could to bury the original, not releasing it until 2005 in the West to promote their shitty remake.
We are all better off without Harvey Weinstein.
The Weinstein-less Pulse is a master class at how much mileage one can get out of a simple silhouette. This movie has almost no special effects. The ghosts are typically just people standing at the far end of a hallway in black clothes. No make-up, no post-production, no scary appliances. They are not even the typical J-horror icon of the little girl with long stringy hair covering her face. In Pulse you cannot quite make out the ghost's face, or if they have a face. Whatever you're imagining is always worse than what the movie shows. The mere implication that something is so horribly wrong is all Pulse needs to terrify you down to the bone.
This is also a movie that violates one of the key laws of horror immediately: only show the monster at the end. Pulse is ready to show a creepy lady at the end of a dark concrete hallway by the first half hour. There she is. She starts walking towards the camera, moving slowly and jerking awkwardly, like a Kabuki theater dance. The hero in the scene jumps under a couch. You'll want to do the same. You might wonder how it can top that moment. Pulse does so by ratcheting up the scale. The last hour is no longer a ghost story. It's an apocalypse story.
Most of these J-horror boom movies were in some way about the horror of technology, particularly shared technology. Creepypastas are just evolutions on what these movies were already doing. The Ring would be nothing without that freaky video tape. Meanwhile, Pulse is an early internet horror movie. It is so early that characters still use floppy tapes and one guy needs the concept of "bookmarking a page" explained to him. Various young adults across Tokyo keep running into weird signals and unexplained websites on their computer. It keeps showing footage of dank apartments with individuals living lonely lives. Or a figure with a bag over its head. I couldn't imagine what was under that dark bag, but I really did not want to see.
Yup. Internet's haunted.
Most of Pulse is divided between the separate stories of Michi (Kumiko Asō) and Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato), both slowly losing their friends around them while uncovering more about the greater mystery. Pulse is a movie about isolation, specifically the thesis that internet life would only make us more alone, not more connected. In 2020, the internet has created many horrible things, but I can't say I'm more lonely for it. Who else would I have to talk about this twenty-year-old horror movie with if not for you guys? These are plague times. If we didn't have the internet, we'd have nobody now. So Pulse's thesis is weak and really it does a bad job explaining much of anything other than "internet's haunted". But the execution is perfect.
Pulse commits to its dark theory of modern life through a very grim filmmaking style. Tokyo is constantly overcast. Every apartment building is dirty and a bit worn. The effect is clear, Pulse's Tokyo is a cold place where you're alone no matter how many millions surround you. It only gets colder and more disturbing once those crowds start to disappear. This is a slow movie with a lot of quiet pauses between the big scary scenes. I think that only adds to the sense of inevitable dread and absolute terror.
If it isn't clear yet, Pulse is one of the best horror movies I've reviewed this month. Massive recommendation.
Next Time: Lady Terminator (1988), Indonesia's take on James Cameron.
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