PULSE@20

Computer wiz stares at his screen in his murky green Tokyo apartment. He gets up and exits, stage style, into another room. A group of twenty-something friends are talking about how they've lost contact with the computer wiz who has been doing some work for their startup business. Michi volunteers to pay him a visit and finds the apartment apparently empty until he appears, gives her the disc and goes into another room. She follows after an awkward pause to find him hanging by a noose against the wall. There had been a big oily stain there before. Now she knows it was shaped like his body. 

Across town young Kawashima, an ecomonics student, realises he has to learn to use computers to get through university unpacks and sets up his PC, clicking through the internet connection and huffing like a newbie at all the clicking and admin he has to do just to get started. He connects but the early 2000's OS does not look like Mac or Windows. On a black screen he sees the words emerge: "Would you like to meet a ghost?" What the hell, why not? It's probably the ISP doing some marketing. What he gets is a split screen of several web cams of people in blobby silhouette moving slowly around their apartments or just sitting at their computers staring at the screen.

Through a process of elimination the six degrees separating Michi from Kawashima vanish like all their friends and they find each other in a city turning into stains on walls, haunted rooms, driving through air that is filled with what look like uncrushed cremation ashes. To where? Wherever.

Kyoshi Kurosawa's apocalypse of loneliness (Kairo in the original Japanese which means circuit which is more appropriate) suggests a world to come will sound like the beeping and popping of billions of old modems as the people slowly harden on the walls and then dry to dust. Unlike other films from the '90s which showed the weaponising of the internet just as people were letting it into the lounge and bedrooms, the internet in Pulse has no malignance of its own, acting only as a conduit between worlds. There is no direct explanation for the ghostification of the world that appears to be coming through the screen, no imagined hyper-corporation or Bond villain, it's more of a phenomenon of a new nature.

Helpdesk woman Harue at the University cannot help newbie Kawashima very much but the computer lab she works in has a strange app running that models human connectedness. It was created by a grad student and she warns Kawashima not to look at it for too long. It looks like a screensaver of the night sky where the constellations move around in the dark. The lab, filled with students in an early scene gets progressively empty in later ones. The pair's own connection seems to be off to a great start until they both go to his apartment and she is compelled to climb the nearby stairs, returning to him minus a lot of her vitality. 

One of Michi's friends can't best his curiosity about seeing apartment doors sealed with red gaffer tape so he untapes one and explores the place. In one room there is a vague human shaped stain on the wall which on second look is a woman. As he begins to retreat she walks toward him in a slow but malevolent fashion. And then she stuimbles (but it could be a kind of dance) and keeps advancing. He is backed to the wall and crawls behind a couch but the thing keeps coming. He screams for us. 

This scene, often referred to as the stumbling ghost, makes it to a high spot on every scariest scene list that is made from the margins of the genre. It doesn't sound like much but the look, the operatic music and grimy hopelessness of it combine with the sheer lack of control over it we have as its viewers get into our spines. There are several more like it, each with their own special device of terror and they give this mostly quiet film a reputation for singular achievement. Nothing is like it, barring other films by the same director but even they don't approach it for the intensity of its dread. Michi's rescue of Junko actually feels demoralising.

What's the point? Well, as already argued, Kurosawa does not have a beef with information technology or even how it might be exploited by the usual suspects of government or capitalism. This apocalypse is about connection and its decay, the breaking of circuits. While there were forms of proto social media in 2001 like irc and usenet which were heavily populated and in constant use they had nothing of the cultural penetration found later in the decade and onward. But I doubt if Kurosawa has seen a great deal of social improvement from this thing that is so present with us now. 2021's Pulse would simply find the point of entry different only in appearance and more insidious. Then again, why bother when it was both the connection of it and the knowledge that everyone else was depending on it the same way as whole nations became shut-ins. Pulse in 2001 meant more. Kawashima in 2021 is too young to be anything but a native-born citizen of the internet and would never have gone through the frustrations that brought him to Harue. 

But that's not to say it doesn't work as well as it did. The notion of the teasing invitation to enter ghosts rooms and the energy draining webcam footage (in one a character starts to walk across a room but the image glitches and starts again creating a loop, it feels crushingly futile or even more crushingly might serve as the last evidence of the person who once was there. If anything, these moments look a lot like the kind of folklore that has grown around the notion itself of the dark web. Hell, why stop there? Youtube is bursting with channels passing home made horror as found footage. It's enough to make Pulse look tame. But it doesn't. Because Pulse is not about the computers but the people who use them and all else beyond whose connection to each other is being ironically deteriorated by communication.

The characters in Pulse are almost all young. The boss at the plant nursery, Michi's mother and the newsreader are the only prominent ones who come to mind and their presence is brief (the newsreader even gets glitched so that half his face is cut off by video noise. The youth of the principal characters is poignant as it is drawn from the hikkmori, the Japanese adolescents and young adults reported to whitdraw not just from the outside world but the space outside their rooms. Various causes have been suggested including a relation to autism spectrum disorder and PTSD but at the time the numbers of hikkimori were reportedly in the millions and looked to commentators like a social phenomenon. Kurosawa was imagining what an epidemic of it might look like. Any number of trival causes might add up to such a withdrawal without the person suffering noticing. Kurosawa adds the notion of ghosts escaping from their existential inertia into the living world as a kind of narrative diesel which he can use to avoid a lot of exposition. The inevitable U.S. remake has characters explain about the red tape as:"It just seems to work somehow." In Pulse someone imagines a situation where the tape used just happened to be a red the first time. The imagined scene suggests the colour took on a significance the same way that people wear lucky socks when they go to the pokies.

I said before that Pulse was unique but that's not quite true. It might seem extraordinary to suggest that the age range of its characters, its release date and location do not admit it into the canon of J-Horror but it really just doesn't behave like Ringu or One Missed Call. While there are three clearly discernable acts to the plot the tension is deliberately scrubbed bare to allow these people space and light enough to wonder at their continued life. One reviewer at the time memorably found it so difficult to describe the style of this film that he called it The Omega Man as directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. He was being funny but he meant it. The only films that this one resembles are its imitators. Those fail the same way that copies of Eraserhead or Possession fail as they don't come from the same compelled statement as the original. That's why Pulse still works, it's still there, sitting by itself, apparently the kind of horror movie ready to get up and dance like all the others but keeping quietly to itself until someone like you approaches it and an act of social charity becomes a meeting you will never forget.

Review: THE DARK AND THE WICKED

An elderly woman tends to her bedridden husband as she goes about the daily demands of farm life. Strange sounds at night as the wolf alarm (clinking things on a string) goes off in the barn containg the goat herd. Among the animals is a vaguely human shape with glowing green eyes. The woman isn't quite the same after investigating which brings her two grown up children back from their lives to help out. The woman cuts her own fingers off and wanders off into the night. She is found dead the next day. Then, in a series of horror effects setups the remainder of the household, some of their friends and the nurse tending the old man are beset by dark and violent forces ... for the next hour and a bit and then it ends.

High production values, good acting and some impressive effects and even a commitment to strong atmosphere cannot save this film from its own pointlessness. Why were the old couple targetted by the evil? It's made clear they weren't churchgoers which would point to the devil (whose warm embrace has chilled a little over the years) or god (who seems to have become even more of a bitch since he got away with his pranks on Job) but it doesn't really make much sense as it then attacks everyone who comes within a cooee of the farm. Is it like Hellraiser where you go to hell regardless of why you started playing with the Rubik's cube of the damned? Trying allegory, is it a grim statement on the withering fortunes of people on the land? I have to guess about all of these because all I get from the movie itself is that there's evil in the neighbourhood and ... don't step in it. There is an approach to a lot of the horror scenes that tie them that has to do with perception but nothing is made of that beyond the fact itself; it can't even say  beware of doing this thing because it feels written rather than thought about the thing to beware appears to have been assumed (beat the hell out of me, though).

I have long railed against the cattle prod approach to horror in films like Insidious or The Conjuring where 90% of all the horror scenes are unearned jump scares which work on surprise rather than suspense. There's not even a lot of suspense on show here: a bad thing is about to happen and it happens. Next!

I chose this as an expendable school night extended Halloween movie, thinking from the title and the tile art that it would be, at worst, a campy extension of The Exorcist. That it then goes on in an apparent campaign of letting its audience know that it's a serious horror movie only makes its lack of substance worse like a Shakespearean actor stage whispering with thunderous projection: "This is scary!"

Currently on Shudder.

DRACULA @ 90

Last night I watched the 1931 Dracula. I can't recall how many times I've watched it and wouldn't ever try to number how often I've just seen the first half hour. I keep coming back to it and probably always will.

Why? Actually, yes, why, when I know that after Renfield comes crawling up the steps of the Vesta's hold with an insane grin and a honking laugh the movie changes gear, gets talky and then kind of ends. Would I be proud to serve this chicken to my family? 

Yes, yes I would. But with resevations. If you have no idea that there were films made before The Matrix you will not get why a rubber bat on wires representing a vampire could scare at least the characters on screen then you will never get this movie. If you think black and white movies are inferior to colour movies you will never get this movie. But if you care to bring your imagination to a viewing the same way you imagine the events of a story someone tells you from their life this movie will touch you.

Ok, so the villagers at the start seem to go into anaphylaxis at the mention of Castle Dracula. The bat that sometimes replaces the carriage driver never looks like more than a bat shaped puppet. Bela Lugosi's line delivery, stretching out the vowels as though he's trying to remember his lines is in every hokey old vampire movie. Same with the tux and the urbane manners. All done. Well, yes and no. Dracula was a tale well known to bothe readers and theatre goers for many decades before this film. This film wasn't the first horror film, the first sound horror film or even the first sound horror film made in Hollywood. But what you are watching when you see it is the forming of the code for Horror Cinema 2.0

Horror was a natural for moving pictures as was any imaginative genre. The first were little more than setups or brief spectacles a la Melies. When committed narrative was added they got stronger and then when sound promised the benefits of both cinema and theatre it was both an exciting and terrifying prospect. Dracula wasn't the first to try this but it was the first to start getting it right. If you want to see an extended nightmare parade of images you have to dig down and find something like Begotten. If you just want to go and watch a horror movie you will have something in mind that shares its essentials with Dracula. From medieval ruins to elegant drawing rooms, chemical smelling surgeries to the leafy grounds of mental hospitals, Dracula builds a world that its audiences could instantly recognise and still be surprised by. The two virginal young ladies at the centre of the second act are not corsetted Victorian vestals but jazz age flappers who playfully talk about Dracula's sexiness. The movie had all the mist and gothic decor of the Stoker novel but it felt like 1931.

Does Lugosi come across as a ham? Maybe. He had played the Count on the stage where his battles with English compelled him to use his physical presence more prominently than his lines. And there's another thing I haven't got to yet which really does make all the diference. The director Todd Browning was a carny; he came from the side shows and big tops where the allure could range from shows of great skill to the sight of disfigurement. He was a veteran filmmaker by the time he got to Dracula and had worked with the great Lon Chaney. If anyone knew how to build and sell the performance of an urbane vampire t'was he. And under his guidance Lugosi brought his best from the stage but pared down because the camera always spots bullshit if it's pushed and his Dracula was a man who could effortlessly charm one minute and go into spasms of self-restraint like an addict the next. Even the accent worked. It might sound goofy and cliche now but at that first cinematic outing it sounded other, alien, weary. When Bela says, "there are far worse things awaiting man than death" Dracula means every syllable.

By contrast the always welcome character maestro Dwight Frye brings an ethereal craziness to Renfield. At first he is a personable city slicker among the villagers but his transformation into servitude to Dracula renders him eerie, in pain from his devotion to the Count but possessed of knowledge beyond the ken of all the normal sluggards around him in the boring old world. His luminous grin is not just crazy it's knowing and what it knows is mystical, terrifying and forever. A late scene where he is crawling across the floor of Van Helsing's study has a genuine eerieness that calls across the near century of its first appearance. His performance is a feat and takes him to the level of Lugosi with all the others, however fine they can be, short of the competition.

Other characters get a more or less functional treatment. David Manners' Jonathon Harker is a '30s handsome lead but in a side role. Frances Dade as Lucy gives us a socialite of her time. Helen Chandler as Mina is a standout, showing us the pleasure and danger of being in thrall to the Count. Edward van Sloan is solid as Van Helsing. No one is bad but they have strong forces to beat. 

But I've put something important off here and it's a detail that cannot go unnoted. Dracula has no music score. There is a theme from Swan Lake over the titles but that became a generic mark. Other than that there is the diegetic music of the scenes at the opera. This is the thing more than rubber bats or cape flinging that gives the film what creakiness it has. While it is effective by its absence in the storm at sea, Renfield's crawling on the ship and then in the study and all of the vampiric scenes the silence under the Foley effects (done here, as it happens by the original Jack Foley) and dialogue renders exposition and action and philosophical exchanges uncomfortably equal. It was left out through budgetary squeezes, not artistic choice and the film does ultimately suffer for it. 

A score was prepared in the '90s by composer Phillip Glass. If you know his minimalist, repetitive style you can imagine this. It's all strings, subjects and strettos but for all that it does add atmosphere, if perhaps over applied. Universal (who have retained rights to this film since it was new) have put it into every release of Dracula in physical media from DVD onwards as an optional track. I would recommend against adding for a first viewing. Keep it simple and you'll do fine.

Last night's viewing was of the newly minted 4K presentation at HDR10 with a DTS doubled mono for the front speakers both of which are appropriate for a film of this vintage. The Glass score is presented in surround. As more picky reviewers have found the new UHD image restores the blacks and darker greys allowing for not just clarity of image but depth. This is the least flat this film has ever looked to me. The disc is one of four released in a box set that includes other high profile Universal horrors Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and the Wolf Man. For physical library nerds like me I opted for the UK release as I already have the very rich Blu-Ray box of the Universal horrors which is housed in a coffin shaped outer case. the US version of the 4K box has a book form with discs lodged into pockets that can be difficult to manage and the blu-rays I already have as well as artwork from the period. What I got was a smaller box with four 4K discs. The lack of waste appeals to me.

So, Dracula at 90, eh? Yes, the marriage of horror and Hollywood money that ushered in the genre in its conventional form and bears the traits of what we still consider horror movies. And these are not blown over hands of the walls of ancient caves as first signs of art, they arrive in a disciplined package of form and function, beauty and industruy. That's the version 2.0 of it, before Dracula there were horror movies. After it there was a horror movie industry, an entity that, as old as it has got, as different as the masks its worn, as reactionary or revolutionary, yet boasts the sinew of a young athlete and the wisdom of antiquity. I will always have a good copy of Dracula, a sdeathless film that utters this line of crushing futility that has been to the benefit of all cinephiles, fans or not:

"To die, to be really dead. That must be glorious."