Pulse (2001) is a movie too few horror fans have seen because it is Japanese and subtitled in English. It is a techno-horror movie about ghosts using the internet to cross over into the living world, leading to mass disappearances and societal collapse.
Set in Tokyo, Pulse connects the loneliness of the internet age with a supernatural invasion. Ghosts reach people online, with computers and cellphones opening a route into the living world. The film builds its dread around isolation and encounters that give you time to watch something terrible get closer.
In one of the movie’s scariest scenes, a ghost’s slow, unnatural movements as it approaches down a dark corridor is enough to make you sleep with the light’s on.
Takashi Miike has said that this is the only film that has frightened him as an adult.
The movie was remade in America in 2006 with Kristen Bell and Ian Somerhalder, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s original. Go find this movie and watch it this Halloween season!
