The concept of being contacted by another realm against your will via your home computer, then, doesn't sound so impossible after all. We live in an age where advertisers target us based on our web browser histories, where the Russian government interfered in US elections, and where "Chinese spyware" apparently records us via our smartphones. But the techno-anxiety themes of Pulse mirror the contemporary fears of today much more effectively than you might think. In 2020, the idea of the internet being used as a conduit for an otherworldly invasion might sound daft. Ring had terrorized viewers by convincing them their own television could kill them, but Pulse went one step further by capitalizing on fears of the vast, unknowable technology of the internet, just as it became prominent in day-to-day life for the first time. But as a nuanced exploration of technophobia, social isolation and psychological trauma, Pulse feels more relevant now, two decades on from its initial release, than ever before. ![]() As the masterwork of one of Japan’s great horror filmmakers, Pulse remains timelessly eerie - thanks in part to one of the most terrifying ghost encounters in the history of cinema. Their motivations are never revealed, but the presence of these horrifying entities inspires those who come into contact to take their own lives spontaneously, leaving behind only a grim, shadowy stain where their corpses should lie. It’s soon revealed that the afterlife has become overrun, forcing the dead to return to the world of the living. “Would you like to meet a ghost?”, one unlucky soul is propositioned. It follows an ensemble of everyday citizens who, one by one, begin to receive strange transmissions from their computers. This is the plot of Pulse, a cult classic J-horror movie about a ghostly invasion via internet-connected home computers.įilmed at the height of the J-horror boom kickstarted by Hideo Nakata's Ring (1998), Kiyoshi Kurosawa's film was a visceral take on the ghost story that, in 2001, proved far scarier than the cheap shocks of other horror flicks. And as mental health deteriorates through paranoia and chronic loneliness, people are disappearing off the face of the Earth entirely. Strange new technologies promise to keep us connected, but the devices themselves are vulnerable to attack from nefarious, unseen forces. ![]() People have stopped turning up to work, and the shops are deserted as a global pandemic forces everyone indoors to shield them from an invisible threat. At the center of a once-bustling metropolis, the city streets are now gray and empty.
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