20 years after its initial Japanese release, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s supernatural chiller
Pulse (Kairo) hits closer to home than ever. The similarities between the film’s events and the global pandemic lends a prescient quality to
Pulse that reads differently today. Kurosawa’s unsettling ghost story draws basis from a terrifying concept; a heavily overcrowded afterlife caused the dead to spill over into the world of the living. It spreads like a viral infection, plunging the globe into despair and death through the very thing meant to connect us – technology.
Everything about
Pulse set it apart from the J-horror craze that swept through horror at the turn of the century. Instead of long-haired ghosts in white or jump-scare laden curses, Kurosawa opts for a slow-burn atmosphere that coils the unease tighter at every turn through the power of suggestion. Never is that more evident that the movie’s scariest scene that shows the ghostly invasion in action. Kurosawa transforms
Cast: Kumiko Aso, Haruhiko Kato, Koyuki, Kurume Arisaka.
An early Japanese techno-horror film (it came out in 2001, when the internet was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now),
Pulse is still perhaps the best depiction of the isolating terror of the internet. The Kiyoshi Kurosawa film follows several people mainly plant shop worker Kudo Michi (Kumiko Aso) and economics student Ryosuke Kawashima (Haruhiko Kato) who are beset upon by ghosts invading the world of the living via the internet. The first half of the film is full of genuinely unnerving and spooky imagery, which fills the movie with a creeping dread, before
The Last Cruise. Of course,
The Last Cruise isn’t fictional – it’s real. In early 2020, before any of use really had any idea what the coronavirus was, the
Diamond Princess cruise ship became a kind of hotbed for COVID-19 infections. As cases in the United States were still in the single digits, the passengers on the
Diamond Princess began to become infected at an alarming rate, leading the ship to be quarantined in the Port of Yokohama in Japan. On February 4, 10 people were diagnosed with COVID-19 (ultimately, 712 out of the 3,711 passengers and crew would test positive for the virus, and 14 people died). Director