Pulse is a film that shocked me. First of all, I had seen the American version, so the part with the red tape being a bad omen and a sign of danger and death perturbed me. Apparently, the American version seriously misconstrued the original concept, although the same director headed both films. In the American version, the red tape was used to block the "ghosts" and to secure the characters inside rooms without leaving any room for the ghosts to come through (or at least, I thought so). In the Japanese version, the red tape was dangerous and signaled that a character was about to be "haunted" by the knowledge of what death holds. The vast differences between these two concepts seriously disturbed and bothered me, as I found the red tape to be a very important concept in both movies. I am also very bad with technology and do not understand most of it, so the thought that exchanges via internet could lead me to committing suicide were a bit haunting.
I also appreciated the fact that the film conveyed a message about humans' fears of death. I believed the ghosts to signify the knowledge of death and what it holds, and each character affected by the ghosts was overcome with the loneliness and gloom that death holds and what can lead one to want death. When watching the American version, I definitely never got the metaphorical message of "the knowledge of death" coming into play after the encounters with the ghosts.
Overall, a very good film with a very good message (except for the creepy internet part).
I think my greatest problem with the red tape in the film was the color and use. In Chinese culture red is good and seen as the best color bringing good luck to those who use the color. To think that red was showing that the characters were about to be haunted bothered me and ended up reducing the level of fear that I felt while watching the film.
ReplyDeleteAlso while the tape was used to keep people out I could not get over the fact that the people were putting the tape on the outside of the doors while they were still on the outside. So my question is “How did the people isolate themselves inside the room if they taped it from the outside?”. These could all be technicalities (that I am over thinking things) but both greatly reduced the amount of fear I felt and in the end I was left confused and not scared.
The entire concept of using tape as either a warning or as a type of protection seems a bit ludicrous to me. After all the film deals with the supernatural. I had a hard time buying that something as mundane as tape could contain any kind of supernatural spirit that was capable of haunting a human to a point of suicide. I suppose the use of such a everyday object may serve to scare members of the audience in that they may encounter the said object on a regular basis. There is also the possibility that such common objects are used so that the audience may feel a bit uneasy about using common objects all of the time, oftentimes without thinking about the consequences.
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