Pulse

I really like the slow and ominous atmosphere of Kairo, especially its depiction of Japan's late 90s and early 2000s aesthetics, including early internet culture and architectural design. The film features some excellent decor shots that enhance its eerie and nostalgic feel.

Fun fact: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, known for his work in horror, actually started his career directing pink films, which are a genre of Japanese softcore adult movies. This diverse background contributed to his unique approach to creating tension and atmosphere in his later works.

I give this film a 6/10 mostly because i love the aesthetics from the early 2000s.

-Concept (Idea Premise, Worldbuilding, Theme) 7.0 -Plot (A,B,C, Writing) 6.0 -Acting 5.8 -Dialogue(Character development, Plot advancement, Natural-sounding, Consistency, Looping(ADR)) 5.6 -Fun 5.2 -Decor (Aesthetic, Graphics VFX, Scenery/Location, Scenes, Shots, Stage Set, Mise en Scène, Directing) 8.2 -Overall 6.3.

I'm an old horror buff. I've seen some of the more notorious stuff around (Salo, Cannibal Holocaust, Caligula,...), but they all more or less about visceral horror.

Which doesn't work if you helped slaughter a few pigs.

What does work? Psychological horror. Impending doom you cannot prevent. Things you can't see or understand, but that are there right in front of your face. Music that shouldn't be scary, but which lingers anyway.

It's a typical, slow moving J-Horror with an atypical idea behind it. That oblivion is actually preferable than immortality.

Gore doesn't scare me - but some ideas do.

Like i said - it made me squirm... One of the best horror movies ever made - for the patient ones.

I'd heard so many good things about this movie, I was rather stunned to find myself, well, bored. Please don't confuse me with someone who thinks horror means blood guts and false scares. Indeed, Kairo has, at times, a delicious brooding unnerving sense of dread, and some undeniably classic visuals and moments. But I found myself becoming less and less affected as the movie progressed, irritated even, that such a tantalizing idea was being drained of it's primal effectiveness. In the end, the haunting deeply felt fear that Kairo sporadically creates is left stranded, and the only thing that I talked about after-wards was how it should've been better.

Sometimes you don't need frantic action or buckets of blood to have a movie that scares you out of your seat.

Like the character in I am Legend, there are few people left on Earth at the end of this movie. Tokyo is a ghost town. Where did they all go? That is left for you to argue. Good film for a discussion group.

Is there a finite space where all the souls of the departed go? What happens when that space fills? Interesting questions that are addressed in a very creepy manner by this movie.

But isn't the universe expanding? Do we have to worry now. Is death preferable to living, if you are lonely? You are constantly thinking while you experience this film, and you are never sure of the answers. Call it "adult horror," if you will. It is definitely one to see.

A group of young people in Tokyo begin to experience strange phenomena involving missing co-workers and friends, technological breakdown, and a mysterious website which asks the compelling question, "Do you want to meet a ghost?"

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa spent years working in the world of "pink" films and direct-to-video movies. He was at this time best known in the west for "Cure" (1997), though it was "Pulse" that would make him an international sensation. Assisting him is cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi, known for two other J-horror modern classics, "Ring" and "Dark Water".

"Pulse" was released at the right time for American audiences to latch on to. The American version of "The Ring" came out in 2002, and sparked a wider interest in Japanese horror, kicking off a wave of remakes. This also helped get the originals a wider distribution in the States -- "Pulse" being among those, as well as "Audition" and many of the Takashi Miike films that had previously been very niche.

Kurosawa uses this film not just to tell a good ghost story, but to explore "the horror of isolation" in a world of increased inter-connectivity. With its dreary, depressing color palette and empty space, we find this story about the Internet to truly be about loneliness. Whether intentional or not, it is a clever social commentary that may be more true today (2017) than it was at the time.

Some early reviews were critical because the film is heavier on style than substance and the narrative is not completely coherent. But since then, praise has only grown. In 2012, Jaime Christley of Slant magazine listed the film as one of the greatest of all time. In the early 2010s, Time Out conducted a poll with several authors, directors, actors and critics who have worked within the horror genre to vote for their top horror films. "Pulse" placed at number 65 on their top 100 list.

The Arrow Video Blu-ray is a fine package and a great excuse to re-visit this film. Contents include (but are not limited to) new interviews with writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (at an astounding 43 minutes!), actor Show Aikawa and cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi (24 minutes); "The Horror of Isolation", a new video appreciation featuring Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett; an archive 'making of' documentary, plus four archive behind-the-scenes featurettes.