Thoughts on Kiyosha Kurosawa’s PULSE (2001). A prescient, existential nightmare of a movie.

I admittedly have a bit of a blind spot in my horror fandom when it comes to J-horror flicks. I’m mostly familiar with Japanese horror from the wave of American remakes that were trendy in the early and mid-2000’s. I think the American version of The Ring is quite good, but many of the other remakes fall a bit flat. I only really started getting into horror around the tail end of their popularity in America (I remember seeing the One Missed Call remake in theaters, woof), but I’d always seen chatter online that the Japanese originals were leaps and bounds better than the American versions. Well, last night I got my first real foray into J-Horror with Kiyosha Kurosawa’s PULSE, and I gotta say, I haven’t been this thoroughly unnerved by a movie in quite a while. Some very small spoilers sprinkled throughout ahead.

For context, I watched this movie on a whim last night as I was just getting ready to go to sleep. This was both a great and a terrible idea. Great, because watching it around midnight in the dark made it that much scarier, and terrible because I had nightmares about it after I finally fell asleep.

This movie is a slow dive into a complete nightmare. And I mean slow dive quite literally, because this movie has a pace that is slow, but very deliberately so. That slowness and patience is what made many of PULSE’s scariest scenes so effective to me. The way the camera crawls through dimly lit buildings and the color-drained Tokyo cityscape, following the protagonists as they search for answers and only continue their descent into madness. The long shots of empty rooms, partially obscured in darkness, that reveal figures where only shadows were before. PULSE’s tension is incredibly effective. The buildup through many sequences induced that intense skin-crawling, knot-in-the-stomach reaction that only really great horror can elicit. The soundtrack only enhances this feeling of endless dread and anticipation, circulating between building strings, ambient noise and singing that I can only describe as haunting. It felt like a bad dream that you cannot wake up from. As people continued disappearing throughout the movie and that feeling of emptiness in the world grew, it almost felt Silent Hill-esque to me (and now, strangely, somewhat familiar after living through the lockdowns of the early stages of the pandemic.) It may be a bit hyperbolic, and also said with a bit of recency bias, but I thought the first hour or so of PULSE is some of the most anxiety and dread-inducing horror I’ve ever seen.

I found that this movie works on a few different levels thematically as well. On one hand, it's a tale about how technology, particularly computers and the internet, makes us more isolated from one another. It seems like movies with similar anxieties regarding technology had a bit of a moment around the time, but its incredible to me that this movie was made before social media largely expanded into common use. That may be because I was a bit too young to really experience message boards, chat rooms and other internet hallmarks of the 90’s and early 2000’s, but throughout this movie it really felt to me like a treatise on the state of social media in our current time.

Harue: What got you started on the Internet?
Ryosuke: Nothing in particular.
Harue: You don't like computers.
Ryosuke: Not really.
Harue: Wanted to connect with other people?
Ryosuke: Maybe, I don't know. Everybody else is into it.
Harue: People don't really connect, you know?
Ryosuke: What?
Harue: Like those dots simulating humans. We all live totally separately. That's how it seems to me.

We use social media and technology to seek connections with others, but ultimately it's mostly just a candy-coated knockoff of real human connection. How much can you really connect with someone through just text messages? You might feel like you're having a face-to-face conversation through a video call, but you're still just sitting in a room by yourself, talking to nothing but pixels on a screen. The ideas PULSE is presenting are all still incredibly relevant in today’s world, maybe even more so since technology plays a much larger role in our lives these days than the early 2000's, with many effects that are more negative than positive.

These ideas of technology separating us feed into the other level that PULSE is working on, an examination of loneliness, depression and existential dread.

Michi: It all began one day, without warning, like this.

As we age, I think we all have that moment. Going to work day-in and day-out, following the same routine every day, and suddenly wondering, is this it? Do I just keep doing this every single day for the rest of my life with death waiting for me at the end? And what happens then? Do I still exist? Do I become nothing? What is all of this for? PULSE’s characters are wondering these ideas out loud as the world crumbles around them, and their fears of death are made manifest by the ghosts slipping into the world. Interestingly to me, the ghosts don’t seem to be the thing killing people throughout the film. It seems like once characters have a run-in with a ghost, they live like a husk of a person until ultimately committing suicide or fading away into nothingness. Surrendering to that existential weight.

Junko: It's so upsetting, I don't know what he was so depressed about. He never said anything, so what could we have done?
Toshio: Maybe he just suddenly wanted to die. I get that way sometimes. It's so easy to hang yourself.

With all of this in mind, I found the last quarter of the movie somewhat underwhelming. PULSE loses some of its visceral terror after a truly fantastic beginning. There are some special effects that haven’t aged very well either. A few shots reminded me of an old SciFi channel made-for-TV movie, which has a certain charm to it, I guess. Despite not fully living up to that initial potential, this movie is still a straight up chiller. My recommendation is not to get as invested in a plot as much as the characters and what they’re experiencing in the moment. After credits rolled I went to sleep and was dreaming of my friends disappearing into black shadows on the wall. A movie hasn't gotten under my skin like that in a few years.

PULSE is absolutely worth a watch or a revisit if you’re into that slow burn, dread-inducing style of horror, with some commentary that is still very relevant today; as modern social media sometimes seems to divide us rather than bring us together, and bring more suffering than joy. I’m definitely checking out more Japanese horror, I think I'm going to try and track down the original DARK WATER next. If you’re interested in watching PULSE, you can find it for free with ads on YouTube, and ad-less if you have YouTube Premium.