Pulse (2001)

Clues on the internet suggest the original Japanese Pulse (released in Japan as Kairo) is not particularly high on the list of so-called J-Horror, where Ringu, Ju-on, and Dark Water are more the first titles to be discussed. This is despite the fact that director and writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation) made one of the earliest with 1989’s Sweet Home. Like many J-Horror pictures from the 1990s and 2000s, Pulse got a US remake a few years on, and like many it had mixed results. I’m one who will stump for the US version of The Ring over Ringu, but otherwise the Japanese originals I’ve seen tend to be noticeably better. Certainly that’s the case with Pulse, although I should probably mention my viewing of the remake was on a somewhat sketchy free youtube version with a problem print or transfer. So I was a little hesitant to pull the trigger at all on the original but then I noticed it was available on a channel I’d already signed up for. Scour those catalogs—they’re often skimpy when you look into it—and cancel subscriptions quickly is turning into a way of life. Getting to the point, the Japanese Pulse is quite good. In many ways J-Horror is all slow burn—we learn the premises through the actions and reactions of the characters and the pacing is slow, like playing a 45 at 33. But the sense of dread is somehow thick and the images are carefully conceived and rendered to support specific moods. We are given ample time for the details to sink in like dense pellets of terror and anxiety paste. Things like black stains on walls, or red tape, or the words “The Forbidden Room” on a piece of paper coming from a printer become quite unnerving. More than you might think, or maybe you have to be in the mood and I was. Times being what they were in 2001, the sounds of modem tones connecting are heard often, and in ways they are not meant to be heard. The internet is unnaturally reaching out to connect with our characters. The premise is vague, leaving us to fill in the gaps: ghosts live on the internet like people in the Superman comics live in the Phantom Zone. Do they like it there? It’s hard to say, but they seem to want the living to join them, which the living find depressing if not terrifying. Pulse is one of those movies whose first half is better than the second, which is exacerbated by a longish running time of two full hours. But in that first half it accomplishes for me everything the much more widely celebrated Ju-on couldn’t—that atmosphere of overwhelming numbing terror, like panic-bad dreams, accomplished all with ideas and imagery and not once ever with cheap jump-scare cuts or gore. Worth a look, and maybe I’m ready for another try at Ju-on.