Hi, new blogger here! I go by the name of Anski. I just want to say a couple of things about my blog before I get started. First, I don’t really review movies as much as I write about the thoughts that come to mind whilst watching them. Sometimes these thoughts are analytical, sometimes they are nonsensical. Second, I like my horror nice and non-Hollywood, so I hope I can bring some movies to the attention of my readers that they might not have discovered otherwise.
All right then, here we go! Kairo (Pulse, in English). Now I know some of you will roll your eyes and go “Geez, enough with the Asian horror movies already”. But the fact of the matter is, Asian horror rocks. And I guarantee that this one is not about a girl ghost that hides behind a curtain of long, black hair. Kairo was on the list when I had the urge (that I now sincerely regret) to really traumatize myself with good horror, since it had been a while. So I made a list of supposedly great Asian horror films and watched them. I had already seen Ringu, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters and The Eye, so I didn’t have many options in the top ten lists people had assembled around the internet. I watched Uzumaki (delightfully peculiar but not trauma material), I got halfway through Marebito (despite my love of vampires, this vampiric mystery made me go “Meh”) and finished Noroi (got really freaked out by aborted embryos, but then they started to move like monkeys and I couldn’t hold on to my willing suspension of disbelief). So I was left feeling rather unsatisfied. Was there nothing out there that could really creep me out good old Ringu style?
My dissatisfaction ended abruptly and chillingly with Kairo. My goodness, what a sneaky film. When I was watching it, I was rather bored. The story unfolds with a very slow pace, so it couldn’t really hold on to my interest 100%. But I did watch the bits with the ghosts carefully, holding my breath and sucking in the atmosphere of dreadful despair. And my god man, did the ghosts start haunting me too!
The basic storyline is about ghosts that have run out of space in the Beyond, so they start to ooze into our world through the internet. Once they have established contact with an unsuspecting web surfer,the surfer starts to feel depressed and eventually offs him/herself, only to become a creepy black stain on the wall that endlessly whispers “Help me, help me”. The stain even manages to call up friends who arrive to the home of the deceased only to stare at the stain in horrified disbelief. Oh, it’s genius.
The mood and tone of the film are exactly spot-on to cause the “I can’t look” -type terror in the audience. I had to hide behind a blanket for more times than I care to admit. The slow pace of the movie that I whined about earlier contributes to the eeriness beautifully. Most importantly, the ghosts are perfect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been disappointed in a ghost movie because the ghosts shows themselves too much, too clearly or just show themselves, period. Kairo’s ghosts are blurry, sooty, stain-like. Even when one pushes its face right up to the face of Toshio (who has just discovered that his friend is now a stain on the wall), you can’t properly see all the features. And the manner of face-pushing is brilliant, too: the slowest of ghostly, glidey walks towards the guy hiding behind a couch, which ends in the slowest and most horrifying game of Peekaboo ever. I see you, indeed…
What still haunts me every day, though, is the noise the ghosts make. The ghosts that ooze through the internet and reach our world make exactly the same sound as new, well-functioning refrigerators. I mean, that’s just not on! We have a new, well-functioning fridge and it creeps the hell out of me. Every time I hear it making a sound, I have a flashback to a video in Kairo that one of the protagonists was watching: a ghost is seen walking past an open doorway over and over again, making the fridge sound. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that. I mean, I saw Kairo months ago, and I’m still terrified of being home alone. With the fridge.
All I can say is, mission a-bleeding-complished! I am traumatized for life. Thank you Asian cinema, you never fail me. And I do know that there are hundreds, even thousands Asian horror gems out there that I haven’t seen yet. I will continue my search, if I ever recuperate enough to be ready for a fresh trauma.
“Death was… eternal loneliness.” – anonymous ghost in Kairo –
