Eerily prescient cult classic about the influence of the internet.
‘Do you want to see a ghost?’, asks a mysterious website featuring grainy images of people staring at screens. When a Tokyo youth commits suicide, the rest of his group of friends starts seeing and hearing increasingly strange phenomena. Has the online world begun to infiltrate reality?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s techno-horror film Pulse, often cited as one of the scariest films of all time, is by far cinema’s most accurate portrayal of early internet anxiety. A sinister slow burn, this key work in our Ghost in the Feed theme programme perfectly captures the unease caused by emerging technologies in the early 2000s. The fear that the World Wide Web could make us do appalling things, translates remarkably well to today’s fears around algorithms and brainwashed teens. More than two decades on, Pulse remains an ominous and eerily prescient cult classic.
On 1 November, Imagine's 2026 Guest of Honour Kiyoshi Kurosawa will be joining us for a Q&A after the screening.
On 4 November the film will be introduced by our friend from Camera Japan.
