Halloween Horror: Pulse (2001)

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse will put the fear of God in you, or perhaps the fear of the world without God. It’s the kind of movie that makes you shake in your bones, not only for the horrifying imagery but also for the despondent, lonely vision of humanity in the new millennium that it conjures on the screen. It’s a ghost story, sure, but so much more: a tale of disconnection that predicts the modern atomization that has melted our brains the further we move into the 21st century. A quarter decade into the new millennium, we’re all haunted by ghosts in the machine. Coming out at the very start of the 2000s, Pulse imagines the literalization of such an experience, pointing to what has come to be.

The film follows two parallel protagonists, Michi (Kumiko Aso) and Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato), who both discover odd things happening on the Internet. Michi finds her coworkers falling prey to mysterious disappearances and deaths after coming into possession of a computer disk that has haunted, looping imagery. Ryosuke gets a new Internet provider and finds himself on a website asking him if he wants to meet a ghost. For the first half, these characters investigate the mystery of what’s happening on their computers and how it’s bleeding into their real lives, before they inevitably meet to join forces in combatting this digital spectre.

Pulse is a slow burn, without conventional jumpscares or the sort of horror movie trickery that you’d expect in a ghost story. There are chase scenes, of a sort, and other more classical scary moments, but characters don’t act like stupid horror movie characters, nor do the scary scenes assault us with violence, gore, or loud noises to keep us on edge. They do rather the opposite. But make no mistake: Pulse is terrifying. 

Kurosawa slows things down and displays unnerving patience in each scene. An early moment with a side character demonstrates Kurosawa’s diabolical patience and formal control. A character is investigating a friend’s death and comes across a forbidden room sealed with red tape. He enters the room only to encounter a ghost, who pursues him moving in a slow, herky-jerky manner, like its physical nature is paralleling the flickers of an old computer screen. He’s petrified and tries to flee, only to hide under some furniture. But we know the ghost is coming, even if slowly. Kurosawa holds the camera in close-up on the character hiding beneath the furniture as the sound design lets us hear the ghost coming, with grunting and muttering and the haunting sound of “help me” that seems to be the death lure throughout the movie. We know the ghost will find him so we’re helpless to watch. We’re trapped with the character, cowering as the ghost finds his hiding place and slowly, excruciatingly, discovers him and looks in his eyes. The droning soundtrack with its tactile whispers and white noise worms its way into your brain. Simply recounting the sequence gives me chills. Watching it is unbearably creepy, even for a jaded horror movie viewer like myself. There are several such sequences in Pulse, where Kurosawa crafts bone-deep chills through his imagery, sound design, and pacing. 

But the film is also disturbing for the pall of sadness that hangs over every character and every situation. These characters seem haunted by modernity even before they meet a ghost. They don’t really have friends, merely acquaintances at work and school. Their families are distant, if they have families at all. They desperately want connection, but seek it fleetingly in all the wrong places. Typical of many J-Horror films, the sadness of Pulse is palpable. These are not lusty young people being dispatched as punishment for their bad choices, as in so many American slasher movies. These are people who are yearning for connection and looking to the Internet to find community, only to find ghosts more than willing to fill the void. Pulse doesn’t provide the levels of sadness of Dark Water or Kurosawa’s own Cure, but it is a movie haunted in more than a few senses of the word. 

Also similar to Cure, Pulse seems to exist in a desiccated, abandoned Tokyo. It’s chilling to see the world’s largest city so barren of people. For instance, when characters ride a streetcar, Kurosawa uses back projection to amplify the surrealness. Thus, characters are almost always alone or in empty locations. Either they’re on the computer in their apartments, interacting with ghosts on their computer screens, or they’re in the liminal spaces of their workplaces or schools, whether an empty greenhouse atrium or a sparsely-attended computer lab. The mystery leads Michi and Ryosuke into abandoned factories and dockyards. Eventually, the movie leads into more apocalyptic directions but it almost doesn’t have to as the vision Kurosawa has painted of the modern world seems post-apocalyptic already. It’s as if the film posits that the Internet is the end of the world, and now those left dealing with the aftermath are ghosts existing in an afterlife.

The only thing that might hold the film back is the climax, where the scale of the film expands beyond what the storytelling can contain. But that’s a minor quibble for a film with lasting power. J-Horror might have become something of a cliche in the wake of the American remakes of The Grudge, The Ring, and Pulse, but going back to the original films like Pulse shows that they are captivating pictures in their own right and far more than the horror movie trends they inspired. What is more, when viewed from our vantage point in 2025, the film’s haunting vision of the Internet and loneliness is downright prescient. We’re all prey to the ghosts of the online world, searching for meaning in a world barreling towards ruination.

9 out of 10

Pulse (2001, Japan)

Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa; starring Kumiko Aso, Haruhiko Kato, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka, Masatoshi Matsuo.

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