Pulse (Kairo) is a 2001 Japanese techno-horror film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. After having watched Kurosawa’s 1997 psychological thriller Cure (Kyua), widely regarded as a masterpiece, I was keen to check out more of his work. (Cure was inspired by David Fincher’s crime film Se7en; it likewise follows a series of gruesome murders and detectives trying to track down the mysterious killer.)
Pulse retains the supernatural element found in Cure (which is absent in Se7en), but it is much more in the genre of horror. The plot follows ghosts who have intruded into the world of the living through the internet. It is not clear if they are malevolent spirits. In Pulse, as in Cure, we witness a series of mysterious deaths; except, they are a string of suicides and people vanishing into walls, leaving black stains behind – not murders. Once it is clear that the ghosts are driving people to suicide, one may assume, of course, that their intentions are malevolent – but another reading is possible.
Pulse is centred around the theme of isolation and loneliness. It explores the isolation and loneliness experienced by those who spend their time online. Ryosuke, a university economics student, signs up for an internet service provider. His computer accesses a website by itself and shows him disturbing images of people alone in dark rooms. The next time he turns his computer on, video footage plays of a man sitting in a room with a bag over his head, with the words ‘help me’ written on the walls.
The concept behind the film is that loneliness, experienced by people who spend their time online, becomes a conduit through which ghosts can enter the earthly plane. The theme of technologically-driven isolation is even more relevant today. While Pulse brings to light the dark side of the popularity of the internet in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, time spent online and internet addiction, and, in turn, isolation, are now much more prevalent. Our search for connection through the internet, as in the early 2000s, is unfortunately driving a deep sense of disconnection. Harue, a postgraduate computer science student, tells Ryosuke, “People don’t really connect, you know?…. We all live totally separately. That’s how it seems to me.”
A graduate student tells Ryosuke the theory that the dead are invading the physical world because their world is overcrowded. The ghosts can be seen to symbolise the isolation that occurs when people spend too much time online. Most of the ghosts in the film, arguably, aren’t malicious and don’t mean harm to anyone (at least, not directly); they mostly beg for help. Yabe, who works at a plant shop, receives a phone call with a distorted voice saying “help me”, followed by an image being sent to his phone – the same disturbing image found on his coworker’s (Taguchi’s) computer disk. So we can gather that this is a ghost in distress. Indeed, the ghosts seem sad or desperate, not angry or vengeful.
The common thread is that the ghosts are trying to get closer to the living. When people make contact with these ghosts, they are consumed by some kind of existential despair. Losing their will to live, people either die by suicide or disappear into the walls, becoming ghosts themselves. In the film, Harue articulates a specific kind of fear or phobia to Ryosuke called apeirophobia: this is a feeling of dread about eternal life, endlessness, or infinity. She says, “I’ve always wondered what it’s like to die.” She talks about her childhood, where she was often left alone, and then adds, “You might be all alone after death, too.” An otherworldly apparition, later in the film, tells Ryosuke that “death was eternal loneliness.” So early in the film, we see a genuine display of apeirophobia (from Harue), an unsettling and pessimistic idea, but then this idea becomes more concrete and real, as we realise that the ghosts are, in fact, trapped in a state of eternal loneliness.
I first expressed my fear of eternal life during a ‘death cafe’ (a meeting dedicated to an open discussion of death and our feelings around it) at the North London Buddhist Centre. This was a couple of years ago; back then, I didn’t know there was a term for this kind of fear. I talked about how I wasn’t picturing a religious kind of hell. I had in mind a more metaphysical fear: the idea that my individual, human mind – with my thoughts and feelings – would exist forever after death, and that there would be no way of ‘ending’ it. The Christian hell would perhaps be the worst possible outcome for life after death, but I would put my apeirophobic vision high on the list of worst outcomes too. In fact, the Christian vision of eternal damnation doesn’t bother me because I consider it highly unlikely that it exists. But the non-religious ‘hell’ I have in mind – my thinking mind existing forever, wanting to exit that reality but being unable to – seems more likely.
This isn’t to say, rationally, that my personal conception of hell is very likely. Under panpsychism – the view that consciousness pervades the universe – the idea that some kind of consciousness sticks around after physical death would be true. But this would be a very simple kind of consciousness, not the complex kind that depends on a living person with a working brain and nervous system. So, perhaps simple forms of consciousness would continue to exist in the atoms that make up the physical body, but it may not be plausible to think that manifestations of more complex consciousness – such as thoughts, desires, and preferences – could continue. Nonetheless, because apeirophobia is irrational, these philosophical considerations don’t necessarily make it go away. The ‘what if’ thought is always present. What if my mind becomes eternal after death? What if I end up like one of the ghosts in Pulse, trapped forever in eternity? I’m not alone in having these kinds of (thankfully very brief) distressing thoughts: there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to apeirophobia.
In Pulse, it may be that, rather than trying to harm the living, the ghosts are in a state of desperate loneliness and are looking for a way to escape their isolation. Therefore, they could be trying to make contact with the living for that reason. But, through no ill intention, making this contact may transmit their despair to the living, thereby leading to their demise. The ghosts’ attempts to get help inadvertently cause the living to suffer. In the film, we see Harue approach and ‘embrace’ a ghost; she smiles as if she gave the ghost a reassuring hug. If the despair of the ghosts rubs off on the living, perhaps it doesn’t when Harue approaches the ghost compassionately because, in this case, the despair has been assuaged.
This reading could also make sense in light of a minor character’s remark to Michi that friendship might not really be worth it, since you both end up hurting each other eventually. Unlike the pessimistic streak of Harue’s comment that people never really connect, this comment about friendships expresses the idea that attempts to closely connect with someone just end in pain. This is encapsulated in Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘hedgehog’s dilemma’, or ‘porcupine dilemma’, which is used to illustrate the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation where porcupines huddle together in the cold to stay warm. But when they get close, their sharp spines stick into each other. Schopenhauer used this as a metaphor to describe how people, despite their good intentions and wish for a close relationship, cannot be intimate without the risk of mutual harm. This dilemma can lead people to cautious and tentative relationships and a reason to be guarded with others for fear of getting hurt or causing hurt. However, these distant kinds of relationships can lead to unsatisfying relationships. The dilemma may also encourage self-imposed isolation.
Schopenhauer argued, pessimistically, that people have to discover an unavoidably unsatisfying compromise of being somewhat close but never close in a way that truly satisfies our desire for intimacy. He writes in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851):
One cold winter’s day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men’s lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners. Whoever does not keep to this, is told in England to ‘keep his distance’. By virtue thereof, it is true that the need for mutual warmth will be only imperfectly satisfied, but on the other hand, the prick of the quills will not be felt. Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance.
This dilemma may be mirrored in Pulse, in which we see a supernatural telling of it: the ghosts, desperate for intimacy, get too close to the living, and this causes suffering and eventual demise. The suffering of the ghosts is not extinguished through contact; it is only extended. This reading also makes sense if we consider the computer simulation we see earlier in the film, showing dots on a screen. It’s explained that if the two dots meet, they will destroy each other, but if kept apart, they will be inexplicably drawn to one another. That sums up the porcupine dilemma.
As in human relationships, as much as we want our suffering to be received and alleviated through contact with others, we often (unintentionally) spread our pain to others. Like the ghosts in Pulse, when we reach out for help, others absorb the pain. Of course, this would be quite a pessimistic interpretation of human relationships, and I think it is an unrealistic picture of human intimacy: we do not simply take on the pain that the person we care about experiences. It may cause us some emotional pain through empathy, but it’s not true that close relationships with people who are suffering have to be harmful, leading us to take a step back. Of course, this often does happen (such as when loved ones are going through severe addiction or mental health issues), but it’s by no means a universal law of human relationships.
According to a different interpretation, the ghosts may not directly transmit their despair to the living through contact, but instead may, by appearing to the living, be proof that there is nothing but eternal loneliness after death. Finding this out could be what throws people into a severe depression, where they lose the will to live. The ghosts are the knowledge of what is to come. Some people with existential OCD – characterised by philosophical obsessions – experience apeirophobia, and it can encourage feelings of anxiety, depression, and the loss of the will to live. But in Pulse, this apeirophobia is made concrete for the living: the reality of eternal isolation is made certain. Arguably, a lot of people would find it difficult to carry on if they knew that what awaited them after death was being forced to exist in endless nothingness, without any sort of love or connection.
However, this reading of ghosts transmitting knowledge of the afterlife may not hold up. If you did find out that eternal isolation awaited you after death, even if this led to profound dread and despair, wouldn’t you still want to make the most out of this physical plane while you can? Why would the characters in Pulse quicken their entry into the reality they so deeply fear?
The message that does come through clearly in the film is that something is wrong with the world of the living. We’ve become too alienated, and technology is (at least partly) to blame. The ghosts are metaphors for the loneliness of the living. As Harue states while watching various lifeless individuals on her monitor, “ghosts and people are all the same.”. When people vanish into the walls, this can likewise be viewed as a metaphor for loneliness. It is as if they withdraw to the point that they become nothing more than stains on the wall: a residue of a life that once was. It reminds me of the hikikomori in Japan: reclusive adolescents or adults who withdraw from social life and seek extreme isolation. They effectively ‘disappear’. The phenomenon of the hikikomori was becoming an increasing concern in Japan at the time Pulse was made, and technology was seen to play a significant part in the problem, as it enabled young people to replace social interaction with internet use and video games.
Pulse is definitely one of the creepiest horror films I’ve seen. You won’t find any jump scares here, but the depiction of ghosts and their interactions with the living is still deeply unsettling and, in addition to that, quite sad. The creepiness is also magnified through technology, with computers accessing websites on their own, displaying highly disturbing imagery. Jack Ashby writes, “By intertwining technology and the ghostly or supernatural, Pulse reimagines the threat of technology as an unknowable, uncontrollable evil that has afflicted post-war Japan.” He adds:
Although represented and powered by a more supernatural evil, Pulse presents technology as an uncontrollable destructive force that speaks to a national fear exacerbated by concerns over the growing prevalence of technology in our everyday lives. On a transnational level, Kurosawa’s film has almost proven timeless in the short 20 years since its release as individual loss of identity and isolation in the world of screens becomes increasingly prevalent regardless of societal and cultural values.
A classic J-horror film that likewise utilised technology to get under our skin is Ring (1998). In fact, in a 2016 interview included in the Arrow dual format release of Pulse, Kurosawa claimed that the film was “totally a copy of Ring,” adding, “In Ring, the ghost came out of the television set. So we thought, ‘What else could be similar but different to that?’” The screen in both Ring and Pulse acts as a portal through which harmful forces outside of our control can visit us; it is a conduit that threatens our reality. The screen in these films acts as a powerful metaphor for fears and anxieties associated with technology at the time; the films reflect societal fears to both unnerve us and get us to consider a contemporary issue – in this case, the invasive nature of technology.
Beyond technology and the supernatural, the existential dread in the film comes from the theme of apeirophobia (explicitly expressed by Harue and instilled in viewers through the concept of the living turning into ghosts trapped in a state of eternal isolation). The film may be particularly uncomfortable for those who struggle with apeirophobia. As u/gym_leeder states in a post on r/Apeirophobia:
Being a horror fan, I was excited to finally watch it. However, I wasn’t expecting for my apeirophobia to be triggered by watching this.
So I’m putting this out there as a trigger warning for those still learning to cope with their fear. You may want to get more skilled at coping first before you watch this movie. Take your time.
With that said, I wanted to share what I thought of the movie. For those who want to know about the movie, SPOILER ALERT It’s starts with the internet and this ghost theme, but essentially becomes a post apocalyptic movie where people disappear because whatever space comes after life is running out of room for souls. The ghosts that spill over into reality are happy because death had been eternal solitude for them. A big thing in the movie is how horrified one of the main characters is over being alone forever. How sometimes she gets scared of life right now because she’s lonely and she thinks life after death will be equally as lonely.
The movie really struck my deep fears of apeirophobia and for a few days I was constantly on a battle of keeping my fear at bay. I was fine for the most part since I’ve learned how to cope with my fear when it strikes, however, I wasn’t expecting to be comforted by this movie.
I personally appreciated how this specific kind of fear was used as an element of horror in the film. And u/gym_leeder, despite finding that Pulse triggered their apeirophobia, also discovered a lot of value in this aspect of the film:
The comforting thing for me is how it normalized apeirophobia. When I first started suffering from this, I felt so alone. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I thought I was crazy. It’s a very lonely fear, both in what the fear is, and in who i can talk to about it that understands.
However, seeing this movie made me feel so normal and okay because that means that the people who made the movie, the writers, the directors, the fans of the movie. They all understand this fear, they have it too. It’s perfectly normal. This fear is just a part of life. I’m okay. I’m not crazy for having apeirophobia. I’m okay.
In Pulse, the fear of solitude is magnified and made metaphysical and supernatural. Harue’s troubling thoughts about eternal solitude and the ghosts we see trapped in the reality she fears could make us question what kinds of afterlives are possible. (For less horrifying visions of the afterlife, I would recommend reading David Eagleman’s book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. This short work of speculative fiction offers highly imaginative and idiosyncratic versions of life beyond death.)
