Spooky Szn
Do you want to meet a ghost?
Watching
Pulse (2001)
The internet was young enough in 2001 that you could make its novelty the occasion for eldritch horrors. If you were born after this movie was made it might be even freakier—imagine having to use a CD-ROM to get on the web (imagine knowing what a CD-ROM is). Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse follows simultaneous storylines that take a while to converge. In one, a young man teams up with a university professor to investigate why disturbing webcam feeds have been popping up unprompted on his computer when all he wants is to surf the web in peace. In the other, a plant store employee gradually loses all her colleagues to grim and chillingly ill-defined circumstances.
Pulse is probably Kurosawa’s most well-known film after 1997’s Cure. In some ways it doesn’t benefit much from comparison to its predecessor, a less shaggy and more precisely terrifying affair. When a woman midway through Pulse turns to…ash? (I’m just going to go ahead and say it’s ash)…and her remains whirl around the room and escape out an open balcony door in a show of rickety turn-of-the-century CGI, the effect is more campy than uncanny, if not weirdly endearing. It’s one of several lo-fi gimmicks that stand in marked contrast to Pulse’s evocative analogue images: rooms sealed shut with red tape, body-shaped charcoal smudges that tattoo walls and floors in spots once occupied by humans. The internet horror is actually only a small part of the film, but the raggedness of the screen-based scares is nightmarish in a way we’re not used to seeing much of anymore on our high-resolution devices in 2024.
While the scares in Pulse are plenty bone-chilling, they’re surpassed in the end by the film’s pervasive sadness. As the main cast is whittled down, the Japan the characters inhabit starts to feel increasingly more desolate. Whether the city has succumbed to a malign and supernatural influence or whether everyone’s merely holed up at home, transfixed by their computer screens, in Kurosawa’s world the difference is razor thin.
Chime (2024)
Like Pulse and Cure before it, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new micro-horror imagines an invisible and indefeasible social contagion. It all starts when a standoffish boy in a cooking class complains to the teacher that wind chimes only he can hear are telling him to do unspeakably evil things, and it’s all downhill from there. This is a film of clean lines, fluid camera movements, brief yet grisly violence, and maddening opacity. It’s a distillation of the things that Kurosawa does best, and basically only those things; the singleminded attention to mise en scène and unsettling soundscapes underwrites a sort of narrative nihilism that’s scarier than anything you actually see or hear. At only 45 minutes long, Chime ends with both explanations and resolutions tantalizingly out of reach. It pulls off a difficult feat, in that it leaves you both wanting to know more and also relieved for it to be over.
The Uninvited (1944)
I really lucked out in finding, and watching, the ur-haunted house movie1 on the Internet Archive right before its tragic outage struck. Under these circumstances I couldn’t go back and revisit it for the purposes of writing a more substantial capsule review, and for double-checking the answer to the question of how it is that a music critic could afford to purchase a seaside manor—even a cursed one, at that—in the first place. If it’s still possible to buy prime real estate on a critic’s salary these days, by all means someone let me know where.
A critic (Ray Milland) and his sister (Ruth Hussey) stumble upon a vacant mansion while chasing after their dog (actor uncredited); they track down the owner (Donald Crisp), who agrees to sell it to them at a steep discount (okay but still…); the critic falls for the owner’s granddaughter (Gail Russell), and love prevails only after the granddaughter’s connection to the eerie happenings in the house are revealed and resolved. If you like your horror movies with stirring chiaroscuro and straightforward special effects—a glass flying off a table, the pages of a book turning of their own accord—The Uninvited will delight; if you like them with a good old fashioned marriage plot thrown in, well have I got a film for you. The Wilderian zinger of a last line—a gag about the in-law literally from hell—is surely a sort of pressure release valve after an hour of escalating spooks, but it just as well recasts the whole movie as a sincere, if analogical, horror story about meeting the parents.
The Phantom of the Monastery (1934)
Aren’t monasteries spooky enough on their own, before you go introducing the supernatural to them? The chilly corridors, the crucifixes everywhere, the hooded men shuffling to and fro, the wails of a flagellant emanating at uneven intervals from a chamber down the hall. Part of the charm of this Mexican talkie by Fernando de Fuentes lies in how long it strings you along. Putting the title aside, is this monastery really haunted or are we just dealing with tricks of the light?
A married couple and their best friend, inexplicably wandering the woods at midnight, spend the night at the Monastery of Silence after a friar and his dog2 find them on the road and lead them there. The best friend and the wife are smooching on the down low; what a coincidence when the monastery turns out to be haunted by an adulterer, one brother Rodrigo who in his youth pocketed the Book of Evil from the library to study how he might offer his soul to Satan in exchange for his best friend’s gal (this of course raises the question, why do we even have that book). The Phantom of the Monastery is light on terror and on moralizing (and I think “don’t go asking the devil for someone else’s wife” is a pretty sturdy lesson as far as these things go). Movies like this one are the reason for the season. It’s a perfect little atmospheric diversion that won’t go beating you over the head insisting that it’s actually about trauma.
Well, alright: I know there must be predecessors, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) always seems to come up in conversation around this one, but The Uninvited feels very much like a touchstone for future entries in the subgenre.
I suppose I should start formulating a theory of dogs and scary movies now.