2001’s Pulse is Horror that got the Internet

mariya
mariya
Sep 2, 2018 · 5 min read

Cyberhorror has a well earned reputation for being garbage. Technology is evolving quicker than we can keep up, so it’s rife for the sort of reactionary, pulled from the headlines horror that is fertile meme ground. (Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=14&v=MG-2zZfLm-U), If You Die In The Game…etc.

So maybe that’s why one of the best cyberhorror films is mostly tangentially about the internet. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Kairo was released in 2001. Very little in this movie actually deals with the cursed floppy disk and haunted website that sets off a chain of catastrophic events.

The terror we feel about the internet is often born of a fear of humanity, a fear of the way our attention is easily hacked and molded. The internet exposes the vulnerabilities that everyone, ourselves included, is so eager to ‘hack.’ It’s a fear of mobs, celebrity, gladiators. The internet is a global consciousness. And we’re pressed closer and closer together like a rat king.

Kurosawa’s films often deal with the slow and often imperceptible dissolution of identity. In his 1997 film Cure, the villain is a master of hypnosis. In 2003’s Doppleganger, an man meets his double. In Kurosawa’s films, the horror invites itself in and integrates into the protagonists lives. It’s unclear where reality — sanity — begins and ends.

Kairo is understated. One of Kurosawa’s stated influences is Mario Bava. An Italian giallo director famous for Black Sunday, Kill Baby Kill, and Bay of Blood. Bava’s use of lighting is some of the best of his time and his films are often set in desolate locations. Kairo makes those influences clear. The lighting is low and plays on the way organic shadows can conjure fear all by themselves. The locations are lonely. When the characters wander the streets or ride public transport, there’s almost never anyone else around. Towards the end of the film we learn that an apocalypse has occurred and most of Japan has vanished, but you wouldn’t know that without dialogue. Our characters are infinitely connected but they never feel that way.

The actual plot of Kairo is simple. It’s two separate storylines that intertwine and join at the end. In the first, four green house employees wonder about the disappearance and subsequent mysterious death of their coworker, who was working on a floppy disk. The second is about an economics student who discovers a cursed website and a computer science student who helps him make sense of it. In both storylines, the characters slowly lose everyone in their lives to the curse.

Kairo is interesting if held up next to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, which climaxes with the repressed human consciousness (as dreams but the parallel with the internet is clearly drawn) merging with reality and becoming a raucous, cancerous, parade. It’s a behemoth that feeds itself, only loosely attached to any sort of logic. Appliances, mascots, and religious figures dance merrily down the streets as if under a spell. Both Kairo and Paprika deal with humanity through a Freudian lens. Who we present ourselves as, who we actually are, and who we try to suppress. They both deal with the failure of suppression.

If Paprika posits that our repressed, chaotic id will destroy us, then Kairo says that at the center of our id we will find nothing. It’s not just a barrage of communication, influence, and horniness, it’s the meaninglessness of it.

Paprika says that our fears, fetishes, and greed will become a monster that will devour us. Kairo says that, yes, our collective psyches will clash. But it’s not with the forward motion of a parade, it’s with the silent din of death.

Both films theses agree on one thing: that there isn’t enough psychic room for all of us. It’s not just that internet and reality merge. It’s that the internet can’t hold all of us. The subconscious portrayed in Paprika is gooey; a corpulent, honey-thick entity just under reality. You trip into it. You think you’re in one place — but you’re in another. Kairo takes a traditional, “when there is no more room in hell…” approach. Spirits have to go somewhere. Eventually our collective consciousness doesn’t even need us anymore. People appear to have corporal forms and then turn into human-shaped shadowy stains on walls. Collective consciousness doesn’t ooze in Kairo, it assimilates reality into itself. And it’s not just a death, it’s a silent, endless maw. Death by existential despair.

Kairo is about loneliness. About how even when we create the ability to be with each other all the time, that doesn’t give us comfort. Company isn’t a cure. Functionally infinite company isn’t either. “You might be alone after death, too.” Harue, the computer science student speculates about heaven. “Ghosts and people are the same.”

Earlier in the film, she presents a digital simulation of the real world. It’s made up of floating dots that are drawn to one another. When they touch, they die. But it’s not because they kill each other. It’s because they’re snuffed out by emptiness. Loneliness begetting loneliness begetting loneliness. The more we try to become closer to one another, the more damage we do.

Kairo posits that communication won’t save us. And that that realization might kill us.

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