PULSE is a Supernatural Horror Film for the Digital Age

When Kiyoshi Kurosawa's J-Horror film Pulse was released in 2001, the mainstream use of the Internet was still in its relative infancy, having common in most households in the mid-1990s. In some ways, Pulse uses its supernatural horror as a commentary on the increasing dependency on the Internet. This is evident in how the plot of Pulse becomes increasingly apocalyptic.

Pulse follows two concurrently running plotlines. The first follows a young woman named Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō) who is shocked to discover that her co-worker Taguchi has hung himself in his apartment. This kicks off a series of supernatural events for Michi and her other co-workers, as they receive mysterious calls for help and encounter ghosts in “forbidden rooms” marked off with red tape.

The seemingly unrelated second plotline of Pulse follows Ryosuke Kawashima, a university economics student who has just joined a new internet service provider. Ryosuke is shocked to find that his computer is mysteriously connecting itself to a strange website. Ryosuke seeks the help of graduate student Harue Karasawa (Koyuki ) and the two soon learn that the dead invade the physical world with the help of technology. This eventually leads to complete chaos, a which time Ryosuke's story intersects with that of Michi.

One of the most unnerving sequences of Pulse happens within the first half hour, in the aftermath of Taguchi's suicide. Michi and Taguchi's co-worker Toshio Yabe (Masatoshi Matsuo) receives a distorted phone call for help. This leads him to Taguchi's apartment and the audience sees his ghost appear in front of a black mark on the spot where Taguchi hung himself. However, the scene truly gets terrifying when Yabe enters the “Forbidden Room,” the doorway of which is surrounded by red tape. Upon entering the Forbidden Room, Yabe sees the ghost of a woman appear at the other end of the room. Yabe attempts to hide behind a couch, but the ghost just ends up climbing over the couch and comes towards him.

While the remainder of Pulse, which runs at a relatively slow-paced two-hour running time, does not end up repeating the terrifying nature of the initial encounter, the ghosts and their barely human shadowy appearance remain an unnerving sight throughout. Pulse also develops nihilist themes, as one by one the protagonists give in to the supernatural invasion and end up disappearing into the void.

This is exactly what happens in the climax of Pulse when Ryosuke finally meets Michi, right as the supernatural invasion becomes apocalyptic in nature. Ryosuke ends up entering a warehouse looking for fuel for his and Michi's escape from Tokyo. While in the warehouse, Ryosuke inadvertently enters a forbidden room and encounters Pulse's most frightening ghost since the original sequence. Ryosuke seemingly escapes from this encounter and joins Michi on a ship full of fellow survivors. However, in the final moments of Pulse, Ryosuke disappears as a black mark on the wall and Michi is left alone in her cabin.

More than two decades after its release, Pulse stands alongside Hideo Nakata's Ringu and Takashi Shimizu's Ju-On: The Grudge as key films of the J-horror boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like those films, Pulse was remade for North American audiences in a 2006 film starring Kristen Bell. However, it can probably be argued that nothing beats the original Pulse when it comes to delivering the scares.