Telltale Heart

I just saw a trailer for the American remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (the "other" Kurosawa) J-horror film, Pulse. I first read about this film a few years ago, when Mike D'Angelo reviewed it at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival). He said it had him plenty scared.

Now, one has to take that with a grain of salt. I don't think Mike is a fan of horror in general (neither am I, for that matter). This means that what passes off for scary as horror would perhaps be too much for him. For example, Mike also had his adrenaline rushing watching Se7en and Blair Witch Project. There were folks who thought Blair Witch Project was not at all scary, and the backlash against it made The Sixth Sense popular (although, it too, wasn't a conventionally scary film).

J-Horror, presumably Japan Horror, refers to a genre of horror that, to put it mildly, is about horror without the usual jump-out-of-your-seat moments. For example, a film like Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the typical American flick. There's some psycho running around with a chainsaw while innocent teens are running around screaming their heads off (before they presumably also become severed from their bodies).

J-Horror, by contrast, is content to be spooky and rather surreal, relying on more subtlely.

Pulse wasn't the first film to be brought to the States and modified. That honor goes to The Ring which was remade from the Japanese Ringu, which involves watching a videotape (if memory serves) that causes a person to become posessed or something. Sarah Michelle Gellar starred in the remake.

I saw neither Ringu, nor The Ring (nor its sequel). I did, however, watch Pulse, the original Japanese. The film is rather old, perhaps more than five years old now.

Basically, it details the story of a few students who work for some researcher. One guy gets a disk. He's a computer novice. When he opens it up, and starts it, he begins to see visions of zombie like people in his computer. He immediately shuts it down. Meanwhile, one of the members of the group hasn't been heard from.

When they go visit him, he appears to be there, but then, not.

Basically, Pulse is a mood piece, which is about these characters who see some apparitions on their computer, and slowly begin to go crazy. Eventually, they disappear, without remains. It is, I suppose, a commentary on the fear of loss of identity.

Initially, these disappearances only appear to affect the people that we've met. But eventually, it heads to a more apocalyptic end, as mass groups of people appear to be disappearing, as if there's some kind of breach between the real world and some kind of netherworld. The experience is creepy, but not especially scary.

At the end, I believe they are on a boat, to try to escape what's happening and find some peaceful place to live. It starts off as a ghost story and ends in a post-apocalptic vision, but all of it strangely muted.

But my point wasn't necessarily to talk about the original. No, it was to talk about the remake. What do the producers/director decide must change to make it more palatable to Americans? First, they need to make the characters more American, i.e., more brash, more chatty, basically the kind of people you see in horror films.

Presumably, they'll amp up the horror parts so that the low-key creepy moments are replaced by traditional boo moments. Whether the film will then transcend (or descend) into the post-apocalyptic moments (admittedly, a jarring turn of events) is unclear.

It's interesting that J-horror is serving as inspiration for new horror, as if the American fare is bankrupt of ideas (which has been true since the Scream series).

Oh, on a complete side note, I just saw a Star Trek book which was about the crew heading to Ceti Alpha V a year or so after the events in Wrath of Khan (which the book implies includes Star Trek 3 and 4). Although I'm sure the book is hardly quality reading, I was curiously involved at least for a few pages to find out what would happen.

The book tries to recreate what happened on the planet from the time Khan was there to the events of Wrath of Khan. I'm not sure how they plan to make it interesting. My guess is they'll run into someone on the planet that managed to survive the whole time and that will be the source of conflict.