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4

Imagine if the internet wasn't actually a tool for establishing meaningful connections with one another that we all obviously know and agree that it is but was just another, newer, digital form of the terrifying existential isolation and mortality we've felt from the very beginning........ haha........ unless?

Think I'm gonna need to come back to this one because it's a very good depiction of ghosts as a lonely invading force of inescapable depression but it didn't quite get under my skin the same way Cure did even though it definitely borrows much of the same trancelike atmosphere, stillness and sense of societal decay/sickness infecting those around you, and as demonstrated by the ending is intending a very different feeling I…

13

"...once the system's complete, it'll function on its own and become permanent."

Unbelievable. I need to watch it again, but certainty one of the seminal films of the 21st Century. Indeed a very digital ghost story, one which encourages us to reflect on the new spaces which have been created or transformed since 2000. People interact with computer screens, televisions...but rarely ever phones. Perhaps because there is no screen (or wasn't really in 2001) for a telephone? It's very interesting and telling that the movie's near-climax (only because the movie takes a sudden, very unexpected shift following which I'm still struggling to make sense out of) is in an abandoned factory, an analogue space, and one where ghosts exist in.…

3

a techno-ghost story that suggests the hollow detachment of the internet is a symptom that is both highly contagious and inescapable 😁

Pulse presciently predicted in 2001 that widespread internet use would lead to chronic loneliness, isolation, and misery; states of mind that are represented here as shadowy black stains and paranoid red tape. the dreary and dread-filled atmosphere supersedes its thin plot, crafting something trepidatious and ambiguous, eliciting scares from the ethereal and the existential rather than the visceral. had to see it on 35mm with a crowd so the internet ghosts that feed off of solitude couldn’t get me

4

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

6

when the internet was so new and mysterious we thought it might plausibly contain demons? Now we know it's just full of assholes.

Double feature this with The Midnight After.

5

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's terrifying masterpiece is a chilling exploration of emptiness, isolation and solitude. As a strange, ghostly phenomena spreads across the globe, people find themselves succumbing to a viral supernatural fate that seems worse than death. A parable about technology and the consequences of personal disconnection, this also boasts one of the most frightening single shots I've ever seen a horror film; a ghostly woman's slow, silent approach across a shadowy room is so much more terrifying than the most memorable jump scare.

6

Got a huge laugh from me when one of the leads installed an internet browser that told him to “have fun” and he very quietly said “okay I will have fun” to himself.

Extremely effective when it’s a horror movie using the inherent strangeness and wrongness of surveillance footage to its advantage. 2001 is an unnerving year to reflect back on in 2020 because how far we haven’t come. We’re still just sitting around looking at each other online and getting lonelier and lonelier. Not a lot’s changed except that most of us have spent so much time looking at each other that we know not to wear wallet chains anymore, as this movie reminds us was once a fashion…

1

89

Finally, a horror movie that makes me confront my deepest fear: the Windows 98 interface.

8

It is still the best among the turn of the century end of world scenarios, and the one that feels the least as a symptom of its time. I watching Pulse when it had just come out, and I was a depressed college student, and it felt like the closest any movie had come to getting my crushing alienation. Every time I rewatched it, I ended up thinking, Is this really that scary, or is it just the familiarity of its raw feelings? Does it even matter? Among the movies Kurosawa did during the impressive and very productive 1997-2003 run that made his reputation, Pulse is the one that feels closest to the run-of-the-mill J-horror movies that come out…

6

probably the best film ever made. one day i will be able to talk about this without crying, but today is not that day. i have depression and this movie understands what it’s like to be depressed and to suffer with your own mind better than anything i’ve ever laid eyes on. i’m not okay tonight, maybe i will be tomorrow, even just for a little while, just a little moment of peace.

6

There has been a glitch, signals lost in noise, the faces we see become blurrier until only a dark spot remains, the screams of help we hear become more and more distant until they are completely drowned out by static, now it is too quiet, like a tv switched off in the dead of night, something is very wrong, and we are so lonely.

Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ Liked

A rare case of a technologically contemporary film (be it horror or any other genre) only becoming more relevant with time. Kurosawa's digital ghost story is actually haunting, as people form connections that only distance them, the living cocooned into ghosts that seek out others to convert but can never seem to keep their turned pals around them. The direction is so subtle that the insistent score only bursts into sound after a ghost appears or something unnerving happens, as if even the composer were caught off-guard. Not scary, maybe, but the melancholy of the picture is as powerful a feeling a film has ever imparted upon me. A masterpiece.