Pulse

2001 Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Horror Marathon 2024 Day 7 Film 15

Michi goes looking for her coworker at his apartment and finds that he's hung himself. Only when she goes to look at the body again it seems to have blown away to a spot of ash. Images of the hung man and calls for help are seen on her computer screen, and booting up a disc to his computer finds other ghostly images. Elsewhere a man, Ryosuke, boots up the internet from a similar CD- the crinkle crack of dial-up commences and on the screen there's a reflection of someone else sitting in the distance. The images flicker and change to other rooms- and one to a room with someone with a bag over their head... every night the computer constantly boots itself up, as though it is a living thing.

Throughout the film there's this underlying layer of dread- with music that drones in waves as characters try to make sense of the figures that start popping up. The colors are especially washed out and grey- rooms seem to be rotting away- lending to this feeling of depression. This is contrasted by the pops of color in red painter's tape for the forbidden rooms that seem to have started a mass societal shift. As tech seeps into the lives of these characters they seem to become less and less human- only reaching out for connection via the web, but finding those on screen as if living ghosts...

As this is even before the modern age of social web and phone apps the film is already questioning how much impact of the internet creates an isolating state for the human experience. Drifting souls as if ghosts walk by and are lost into the void, and the inertia of social sadness drags everyone down. The sequences of the characters walking through empty city streets reminded me of years of covid as well - where our social capabilities were stagnated. Even as we reach out to a sea of people, we only ever alone. Feeling isolated even in a crowded space is especially depressing-- and so people seek mirrors of themselves online. Society collapses into spaces that only echo unending nothingness....

My favorite sequences have moments where the bursting of reality vs digital vacuum seems to seep through, collectively taking over the populace.. The pacing of the film could have picked up a bit so that there felt like there was more pressure and horror to come through. What is there instead is this sort of floating aimlessness that creates a different mood-introspection but slight boredom and waiting. Perhaps it's that feeling of nothingness that asserts itself as effective depression horror- the only out being a pull towards death.