(Although, we do seem to miss the explanation in Pulse 2001 that all of this had something to do with people returning from the afterlife because there was no room there anymore). The red masking tape is explained as something that blocks out the spectrum of light that the creatures need to exist on. There is an explanation for everything – that a hacker broke into a super-broadband project and accidentally unleashed creatures that exist on another dimensional plane, which have become akin to a virus spreading across communications networks and sucking out people’s will to live. The other surprise is that Wes Craven remains very faithful to the elements of the Japanese original at the same time as he knits Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s plot dead ends together into something that makes surprising sense.
The Japanese original recast with standard twentysomething faces – Kristen Bell, Ian Somerhalder The surprise comes in seeing the name of Wes Craven, who was apparently assigned to direct Pulse at one point, on the script. The heavy disappointment is that the original has been reworked for the modern teen horror market and recast with pretty young leads in their five minutes in the spotlight. There is both a surprise and a sinking disappointment that comes as one sits down to watch Pulse 2006. The fact that Hollywood has chosen to remake such a baffling film surely says something about how far producers are willing to scour for merchandisable properties in order exploit a fad.
To its credit, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films always come with an intensely haunted atmosphere that makes them highly watchable. Pulse, for instance, threw up a host of elements – ghosts, the dead turning up on the internet, people being driven to commit suicide en masse, the red tape, the social apocalypse at the end – but seemed to hold the idea of any explanation for what was happening in total disdain.
PULSE 2006 SERIES
Kurosawa perpetually defies any sense that a film should have a clearcut explanation for what is happening and his films invariably disintegrate into a series of loose and unresolved plot strands. All of these are cryptic and wilfully obscure. Kurosawa has made films such as Cure (1997), Seance (2000), Loft (2005) and Retribution (2006), among others. The problem with this is Kiyoshi Kurosawa as a filmmaker. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is a baffling choice for a Hollywood remake. In this case, Pulse is a remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001).
Ever since the enormous success of The Ring (2002), the English-language remake of the Japanese horror film Ring (1998), Hollywood has been scouring Asian horror for properties to remake.
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