October Horror 2012: Kairo

Kairo (also known as Pulse) is a 2001 Japanese horror movie about a web cam site that promises visitors interactions with the dead.  It was remade in 2006 as the American film Pulse.


Kairo is possibly one of the most serious movies we've seen this year.  The movie is very slowly paced and almost 2 hours long.  There are a lot of lingering shots, and the color palette is really muted.  It feels like it was filmed in the 70s, using fashions and computers from the 90s.  It's also really creepy, if more than a bit confusing.  For most of the film the view switches between 2 unrelated stories of people being affected by what's going on, which seems to be a city being slowly depopulated via mass suicides that don't leave traces.  There's one thread that follows the staff at a greenhouse discovering the website after their techie friend commits suicide, and a 2nd one following a modern Luddite who spontaneously uncovers his keyboard and connects to the internet, stumbling upon the site for some reason I can't really remember.  It just sort of happened.

What's impressive is that the movie is almost entirely bereft of special effects, presenting its ghosts as mostly people in shadow in the corner and using clever editing to make ghosts vanish into black stains on walls.  It raises a lot of questions about if you're seeing the ghost, the person before fading away, or a hallucination of some sort as the character is initially unwilling to accept the death.  It's incredibly creepy without really using a single scare, shock, or death.

It does falter a little bit because the plot is really hard to follow, I don't know if that's a virtue of the plot itself or just my missing something in the subtitles.  I wouldn't mind a dub of this movie at all, I think it might help comprehension.

This is probably something that should be analyzed in much greater depth, but unfortunately I don't have a lot of time with the October marathon schedule.  I may revisit this later and probably do some comparisons of it with the remake Pulse, which I also enjoyed, but it's a very different kind of film.

Anyway, internet week comes to a close with The Signal.