Selected Google Searches Regarding Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Pulse”

by Abigail Oswald

Andras Vas

are ghosts real

The story goes that there’s no room left in the afterlife, so all the ghosts without a home flood back into our world through the internet. The computer screen is a window, or a door — one which can be opened from either side.

can ghosts live in the internet

I have a theory that we are all creating ghosts of ourselves in real time. As we collectively bear witness to the pain of others, our posts and messages add to a greater body of grief that keeps expanding even after we are gone. In Pulse, the internet acts as a window into human isolation. A film made more than twenty years ago about people alone in different rooms, staring blankly into space, into screens — unnervingly prescient, a kind of prophecy.

If ghosts do exist, doesn’t it make sense for them to live on in the digital realm? For some shred of personhood to take refuge in its digital imprint, clinging to the version of itself created during life? What does it mean that we can feed a volume of texts and emails to an AI and make it churn out an approximation of another’s voice?

what is a ghost

The day I learned of a loved one’s death, I saved an image of her in a folder on my desktop. I have since found myself unable to delete her file or even move her to another place. It’s not superstition, exactly, yet I feel that to move or delete the photograph would be a loss of something. A disruption I can’t explain. Is writing about someone also a way of keeping them alive? If I were to type her name here, where she wasn’t before — what have I conjured?

Perhaps memory, in its own way, is a kind of haunting. In Pulse, people vanish, but they aren’t forgotten.

what do ghosts want

A ghost approaches a doomed boy in slow motion — rewind, play. This is the most frightening scene in the movie, so I watch it over and over again. I used to do this when I was younger, too, and I can’t explain it — the feeling that builds within you when you’re watching something truly terrifying: a delicious kind of primal, horrified excitement.

The ghost’s movements are unholy, wrong; she advances as if underwater. I’m holding my breath. The boy hides, but of course he will be found. Slowly, the ghost looks over the back of the couch. We see her hands first, her face in pieces. Just as on the internet, a revelation in fragments.

Is she grief? Is she death? A memory, a shard of who she once was? And when she reaches for a human being, what is it that she’s seeking?

Perhaps in this moment, it does not matter. All we know is that something is about to change. And if you fear the unknown, change is horror.

is pulse a scary movie

In an earlier draft, I was sure I was writing about fear. Pulse is a horror movie, after all. In a later draft, I considered the eerie emptiness of apocalyptic Tokyo after most of its inhabitants have vanished and thought, no, I am writing about loneliness. But I realize now that fear and loneliness are much closer than I first believed. We run from our fears; we attempt to escape them. But it is terminal loneliness that overtakes you when you succumb to the belief that no one is coming to save you.

There is a moment that recurs over and over again in Pulse: a character accepts their doom and disappears, leaving nothing behind but a black stain in the soft shape of a human being.

pulse ending explained

Every night I shut off my laptop before going to bed; I bring the lid down in a single smooth motion. Perhaps I am closing a door.

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Abigail Oswald can be found at the movie theater in at least one parallel universe at any given time. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, DIAGRAM, Split Lip, and elsewhere, and her short fiction was selected for Best Microfiction 2021. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and currently resides in Connecticut. More online at abigailwashere.com.