In its opening seconds, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (aka Kairo) reminds us that it’s a movie from 2001. Over the production credits, we hear the unmistakable crackle and whine of a dial-up modem, slowly connecting to the internet. To people accustomed to broadband and smartphones, a dial-up modem feels as outdated as an abacus. But despite its old tech, Pulse remains the definitive internet horror film. Even if the more recent Unfriended movies or last year’s Friend Request feature Facebook, YouTube, and other programs familiar to modern audiences, Pulse retains its power because it knows that the internet doesn’t scare us because of what it changes, but because of what it cannot change.
In most internet horror movies, the web functions like some sort of Hellmouth, a deal we’ve made with the (sometimes literal) devil in exchange for comfort and convenience. The characters in Unfriended: Dark Web can play Cards Against Humanity together without leaving their homes, but the evil hacking group they anger uses those same networks to destroy their lives. Friend Request’s protagonist gains popularity through social media, but Facebook becomes the conduit for a vengeful spirit.
To be sure, Pulse sometimes seems equally alarmist. Its split narrative structure follows two sets of 20-somethings in millennial Tokyo, the first involving three coworkers — Michi (Kumiko Asô), Junko (Kurume Arisaka), and Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo) — investigating the suicide of their friend Taguchi (Kenji Mizahashi). The search not only reveals Taguchi’s internet addiction, but also the existence of “Forbidden Rooms”: haunted spaces marked by red tape around their doors and windows. After Yabe, and then Junko, encounter ghosts in Forbidden Rooms, they both fall into deep despair, leading to the former’s suicide and the latter’s dissolution into grey pixel-like dust.
At the same time, engineering student Ryosuke (Haruhiko Katô) finds his computer automatically connecting to the net and playing disturbing videos. A tech novice, Kawashima enlists the aid of computer science major/paranormal researcher Harue (Koyuki), who theorizes that the afterlife has become too full, and now ghosts are making their way through any portal available, including the internet.
As more specters come through the internet and in Forbidden Rooms, suicides and disappearances skyrocket, transforming Tokyo into a literal ghost town. With the rest of her friends gone, Michi eventually joins Ryosuke and Harue, desperate to retain their will to live in an empty world.
That synopsis might imply a story filled with incident, but Pulse is anything but fast-paced. Like most J-horror of its era, the film puts mood over narrative clarity, and that’s particularly true of Kurosawa, whose movies have been described by musician Jim O’Rourke as “existentialist tone poems in the guise of entertainment”. As demonstrated by his tendency to deliver backstory in clunky exposition dumps (if at all), Kurosawa would rather watch people walk through an empty Tokyo city center than explain that a ghost apocalypse has wiped out the city.
That style might frustrate a first-time viewer, but it also underscores the film’s central theme. The audience feels just as alienated from the characters as they do from each other. We don’t know why things happen, we don’t know why people make their decisions. They just do.
Nothing illustrates this distance better than the first Forbidden Room sequence. Yabe enters to find a nondescript cement corridor, empty save for a leather couch above one end. As he studies a clump of red tape on the wall above the couch, Yabe realizes that he’s not alone, and turns around to see the figure of a woman at the opposite end. Her arms swaying with an uncanny vigor, the figure strides toward Yabe, stumbling midway but continuing with unnerving determination. A terrified Yabe scurries behind the couch, but a series of shot/reverse shots show the woman slowly peering at him over the seat, strands of her hair billowed by an absent breeze.
In an interview with Reverse Shot, Kurosawa described ghosts in Japanese fiction as “foreign presences” that you can’t fight or ignore, but have to let “coexist.” That might sound dull, but this scene shows why it’s horrifying. The figure approaches Yabe, but she doesn’t kill or even touch him. The ethereal quality of her pace is unsettling, but nothing in her body or face is grotesque. It’s simply blank and pale, persistently staring.
Ghosts exist. That’s all they need to be scary, to drive Yabe and everyone else who encounters them into states of irrecoverable despair. Neither active threats nor walking memento mori, Kurosawa’s ghosts reveal that death brings no relief from the pain of living. They terrify because they show the characters that no one can truly connect with another person. We are all permanently, helplessly alone.
Pulse explores this theme several ways, some of them clunkier than others. Early in the film, Harue shows Ryosuke a computer program with white dots floating along a blank screens. The dots are like people, she explains: they try to come near each other, but “they never really connect.” She expounds on this idea later, after she’s encountered a ghost, telling Ryosuke that she used to look forward to death because she would be joined with everyone else who passed on. “But in death,” she says, “You’re all alone too.” Ryosuke rejects this claim, repeatedly promising to stay with Harue and refusing to believe in the ghosts, even when he actually sees them. But after stumbling into a Forbidden Room and coming face to face with a ghost, Ryosuke too succumbs to its message: “Death is eternal loneliness.”
Kurosawa makes the point more effectively in his portrayal of everyday life, showing the characters’ inability to connect with one another. After learning of Taguchi’s suicide, Yabe talks about it at a cafe with Junko and Michi, casually telling his friends that he has thought about hanging himself too. Not only do the pair let Yabe’s confession pass without comment, they don’t even look at him, or at one another, at any point in their conversation. When Junko and Harue fall into depression after seeing a ghost, Michi and Ryosuke promise that they’ll stick with their friends and pull through together, but they almost always leave immediately after making the declaration. It’s usually for a good, mundane reason —to make Junko some lunch or to get a tool to help Harue — but the message is clear. No matter how much we want to stand by one another, no matter how much we think we’re helping, we’re constantly abandoning one another.
By the time Harue launches into the movie’s sole Luddite rant, we understand that the problem predates the internet. Continuing her thoughts about loneliness in life and death, Harue shows Ryosuke a wall of monitors, each playing a stream of men alone in their rooms. “Are they alive?” Harue asks of the internet users, “How are they different than ghosts?”
She makes a solid point, one found in everything from local news editorials to net-panic movies of the 90s: the web only gives the appearance of connectivity, but we’re only separating ourselves from one another. But as indicated by the way ghosts manifest in decidedly lo-fi places like warehouses and library stacks, Pulse insists that extreme seclusion exists independent of the internet, that computers are just one of many ways we can isolate ourselves.
One of the movie’s reoccurring images illustrates this inescapable isolation. After Taguchi’s suicide, his friends find a disk containing a picture of him in his room, staring at his computer monitors with his back to the camera. On one monitor, we see the exact same image — an isolated man repeating over and over, infinitely inevitable and infinitely alone. On the other monitor, we see Taguchi’s ghostly face reflecting on the black screen.
Taken by itself, the shot makes a simple anti-internet point, that the web promised Taguchi boundless community, but all he found was his own emptiness. But that’s not the only time we see that picture. It occurs near the start of the film, when Michi calls to check in on Taguchi. It’s the exact same shot, with the same yellow haze and Taguchi standing still, but it’s accompanied by a ringing phone. Phones are just as useless as computers, the scene tells us. We’ve always been alone.
Ultimately, Pulse suggests that no medium can overcome the solitude fundamental to human existence. Kurosawa extends this point to the medium he’s using, making us viewers just as alienated as the characters. He shoots many scenes as long, unbroken takes, with the camera peering through windows or behind plants, keeping distance from his subjects. He only lets the camera approach a character or take one’s point of view during a haunting: we watch Taguchi ignoring Michi’s phone call as he stares into his blank screen; we take a ghosts perspective as Harue clutches its face and begs for connection; we look through Ryosuke’s eyes as a ghost’s face becomes too close and clear for him to ignore.
While the innovative “computer screen as movie screen” effect in Unfriended or in the upcoming Searching may give those films a level of realism, putting viewers in the place of characters as they encounter online monsters, Pulse’s camera work better illustrates the terror of the internet. It’s not the innovations offered by newer apps and impressive technology. It’s our human loneliness, something no technology can cause or overcome.
