Pulse

Pulse (Kairo, 2001) is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's slow-burn Japanese horror film, available to watch online on iFILM. In a vast, grey Tokyo, people are quietly vanishing and leaving scorched human shadows burned onto the walls.

It starts with a young programmer who drops out of contact. When a friend finally visits his apartment, his shadow dissolves off the wall in front of her. Elsewhere, a student stumbles onto a website that whispers a single question: do you want to meet a ghost? Kurosawa works through long static shots, dead air and dread that seeps in rather than jumps out. Here the dead bleed into the living through phone lines and dial-up cables, and loneliness spreads like a contagion.

This is mood-driven, deeply unsettling horror for viewers who prefer creeping atmosphere to cheap shocks. Pulse foresaw the isolation of a wired world years before social media, and it still ranks among the finest Japanese horror of its era. Stream Pulse (2001) online on iFILM.