One of the most haunting horror films of the new millennium is now available to rent and buy on Amazon. It’s particularly frightening because it’s about so much more than just ghosts from the internet.
A few years ago, the Moviepilot team declared Pulse by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to be the best horror film of the 2000s. If you want to see the eerie quality of this tech-terror masterpiece for yourself, you have the opportunity to do so from March 7, 2024 … if you dare.
New on Amazon: Pulse gets the pulse racing
The Internet was supposed to bring us together as a society. Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure – Kyua), who incidentally is not related to Akira Kurosawa, already suspected at the turn of the millennium that the new technology would not fulfill this utopian promise. There is hardly any other explanation for his film Pulse.
When greenhouse employee Michi (Kumiko Aso) visits her colleague Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi), who has been missing for days, to pick up a diskette, she has a brief conversation with him. A few moments later, she realizes that the young man has hanged himself in his apartment… a while ago. Video streams of the deceased continue to echo through the net and seem to plead for help. But soon all that’s left of Taguchi is a smudge on the wall
(Pulse)
More and more people are now being swept away by the same lethargy, which is taking on almost apocalyptic proportions. Do the forbidden rooms have anything to do with it, with their red taped doors that make them look both dangerous and inviting? Why does his computer ask the student Ryosuke (Haruhiko Katô) if he wants to see a ghost? And what’s the story behind the website full of digital dots that want to find each other?
The horror film tells of loneliness in the face of mass technology
Unlike typical J-horror films, Pulse does not have an accessible curse mechanic. In Ring – The Original, you die a week after watching a cursed videotape, in Ju-on: The Grudge after visiting a haunted house. But what is behind the intangible deaths in Pulse? As you can see, it’s not quite that easy to solve. Rather, one would have to ask what leads to loneliness, depression and suicide in big cities and despite an internet connection – and Kurosawa does this masterfully here in genre garb.
Have we all long been lonely ghosts in forbidden rooms, calling for help in vain? After the long isolation of the corona pandemic, the melancholy of this film feels completely different…
(Pulse)
But don’t let the depressing description mislead you. Pulse is first and foremost an unspeakably eerie horror film and presents some of the most disturbing ghostly apparitions that Japanese cinema has ever produced. The US remake Pulse – You’re Dead Before You Die, which even spawned two direct-to-video sequels, really can’t compete.
In an interview with Reverse Shot at the time, Kurosawa explained why he finds the ghosts of his home country more sinister than their American counterparts:
In the standard American horror canon, you at least have a chance when a ghost violently attacks or haunts you. What you’re fighting for then is the idea that you can defeat the evil thing and return to the good old days when ghosts weren’t around.
But if they don’t attack you, the best you can do is find a way to coexist with them. I find the idea that you just have to live with this thing much more terrifying. You have no chance of running away or fighting it; you’re stuck with it forever.
