CONTENT WARNING: THIS EPISODE INCLUDES DISCUSSION OF DEPRESSION AND SUICIDE

Whether you call it PULSE or KAIRO or CIRCUIT, this week’s movie is as unnerving as a dial-up tone.

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, PULSE is a cornerstone of the J-horror boom that trades the jump scares of its contemporaries for a slow-crawling sense of existential dread. The film follows two groups of young people in Tokyo who start engaging with ghostly transmissions appearing on their computer monitors.

In our bonus feature segment, we briefly dive into the history of horror cinema in Japan, the J-horror wave of the early 2000s and how American remakes worked and didn’t.

Does PULSE matter in 2026? This might be our most divisive discussion yet.

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