Beat It

Mike D'Angelo has raved about a few films that have terrified him. I remember, first and foremost, was David Fincher's, Se7en. Quoth Mike, I cannot recall ever responding so physically and viscerally to a motion picture before. A few years ago, at a film festival, Mike said the same thing about Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (the other Kurosawa) Pulse.

So effusive was his praise, that his quote "More frightened than I've ever been in a movie theater" sits on top of the English release of this film.

Given his similar reaction to The Blair Witch Project, and the tepid response by true horror fans, all I can say is that D'Angelo (and critics like him, say, Scott Renshaw) do not watch horror on a regular basis. To be fair, I don't watch them either, but I know to take his hyperbolic descriptions with a grain of salt.

J-Horror, as Japanese horror is referred to, lacks the kind of jump-out-of-your-seat thrills that horror has, and prefers a creepier, moodier setting.

Pulse wavers between two films. The first half of the film is about seeing strange visions on a computer. It involves a group of students who seem to work in some kind of botany lab, and an economics student named Kawashima, who decides to get onto the Intenet for the first time, and has his computer showing him scenes of people, before sending him the eerie message "Do you want to see a ghost?".

The first half is creepy. There are rooms sealed in red tape, and what appears to be burn marks of bodies on the wall. Later on, a random student explains (in his mind) the strangeness as ghosts leaking into the world. It appears to be a meditation on seeing something so frightening that one becomes disengaged from the world, and that people seek others and fear being all alone.

As the film heads into the second half, it becomes less horror, and more of a zombie post-apocalyptic world, as people are beginning to disappear, after seeing ghosts.

And as it headed into the second half, I was wondering when it would ever end. I suppose Pulse is about the fear of losing everyone around you, more than conventional scares.

Oddly enough, after I left the film, shortly after midnight, and was walking the nearly desolate streets of DC, heading to the Metro, on a cold windy night, then heading into Metro Center, and staying on the train for ten minutes or more, before it finally moved (apparently, the last train of the day--it was waiting for those with connections to work their way to this train), I felt an isolation to everyone I saw.

To be sure, these were strangers to me, but it seemed all the more heightened after watching the film.

This is the second film I've seen (the other one being Samaritan Girl, or was it Tropical Malady?) with Windows products in Asian lettering. I have to wonder if there are MS employeers who think about the internationalization efforts that allowed the software to cross international borders. I know it's a particularly geeky thing to think about, but I suspect there's still a film out there that still needs to touch on those who live their lives on the Internet.

These first films that have explored the Internet see it as a creepy Frankenstein creation. Films like Copycat or Me, You, and Everyone We Know deal with the fear elements. Occasionally a film like You've Got Mail or Napoleon Dynamite envision the possibility of love. I think there's still something more that can be said about this brave new world.