There are bad horror remakes, and then there is Pulse (2006)—a film so devoid of life it feels like it was drained by its own ghosts. Directed by Jim Sonzero and co-written by Wes Craven (yes, that Wes Craven, though you’d never guess it), this techno-horror disaster takes the eerie existential dread of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Japanese original and translates it into… Kristen Bell fighting Wi-Fi. It’s like someone took a ghost story, put it through a spam filter, and called it cinema.
Broadband of the Dead
The premise is simple and should’ve been terrifying: spirits use the internet as a portal into our world. In Kurosawa’s Kairo (2001), that meant a slow, creeping dread about technology, loneliness, and the futility of human connection. In Pulse (2006), it means CGI smudges with the screen presence of a bad screensaver.
The film opens with Josh (Jonathan Tucker) being attacked in a library by what looks like leftover smoke from a vape pen. Moments later, he hangs himself with an ethernet cable, which is supposed to be tragic but mostly made me wonder if DSL was really that depressing in 2006. His girlfriend, Mattie (Kristen Bell, clearly counting the minutes until Veronica Mars renewed her contract), stumbles into his mess and starts piecing together the mystery.
The “horror” consists of glitchy messages, ghostly pixel static, and Kristen Bell looking at computer screens like they’re delivering bad Yelp reviews.
Red Tape, But Not the Bureaucratic Kind
The film hinges on one hilariously stupid conceit: ghosts can be kept out with red tape. That’s right—spirits that travel through the internet are apparently defeated by Home Depot’s paint aisle. You can’t reboot your laptop without summoning death, but Scotch tape dipped in cherry Kool-Aid? Ghost kryptonite.
At one point, Brad Dourif shows up as a paranoid guy with his entire room wrapped in tape. This is supposed to be unsettling. It looks like a low-budget art installation. Honestly, I started rooting for the ghosts. If I were an otherworldly entity, I’d be insulted that my cosmic invasion could be foiled by arts and crafts.
Performances: Dead on Arrival
Kristen Bell plays Mattie, our heroine, with all the passion of someone trapped in line at the DMV. You’d think fighting spectral malware would involve panic, desperation, or at least a raised eyebrow. Instead, she spends most of the film with the same expression she uses to ask for almond milk at Starbucks.
Ian Somerhalder plays Dex, the discount love interest. He spends half the movie explaining the plot to Mattie and the other half trying to look moody while CGI smoke monsters lick his face. He’s the kind of character who’d die heroically in a better film. Here, he survives, and it feels like a punishment for the audience.
Christina Milian shows up, presumably to diversify the cast and add a “sassy friend” archetype. Unfortunately, her big moment involves being eaten by a ghost that looks like the world’s angriest Snapchat filter.
Jonathan Tucker, as Josh, dies early but sticks around via computer messages, which is a shame because his performance at least suggested someone was trying. When your dead guy has more energy than the living cast, you’ve got problems.
Special Effects: Dial-Up Nightmares
This movie cost $20 million, and yet the CGI ghosts look like they were rendered on an old Dell running Windows 98. They’re vague, wispy shapes that flicker like corrupted JPEGs, occasionally lunging at the camera with all the menace of a glitching DVD menu.
Instead of building tension through silence or suggestion, the film goes full “boo!” with bad digital noise. Imagine someone throwing static cling across the screen and adding reverb to your microwave beeping—that’s the sound design. The original Kairo managed to make a single ghost slowly walking into a room absolutely terrifying. Pulse makes a ghost sliding out of a Wi-Fi router look like a failed Super Bowl ad.
Themes: Ctrl+C, Ctrl-V
The original film was a meditation on isolation in the digital age. It asked: what if technology, instead of connecting us, only highlighted how profoundly alone we really are? It was bleak, tragic, and devastating.
The remake asks: what if AOL Instant Messenger was haunted? That’s it. No existential questions, no emotional resonance. Just Kristen Bell yelling “We have to stop the server!” while looking like she’s about to unplug the wrong router.
When the military shows up declaring “safe zones” with no internet or cell phones, it accidentally becomes a metaphor for my grandparents’ house. Nothing says apocalyptic dread like a vacation in the Wi-Fi dead zone.
Death by Plot Hole
The rules of this movie are murky at best. Sometimes the ghosts kill instantly. Sometimes they slowly drain your will to live (which feels autobiographical on the filmmakers’ part). Sometimes they just stand in the corner and look embarrassed to be here.
The red tape rule is especially ridiculous. If tape works, why not tarps? Why not red Post-Its? Hell, just wrap yourself in a red Snuggie and call it a day. When your horror logic can be undone by a trip to OfficeMax, you’ve lost the battle.
Dark Humor Takeaway
Watching Pulse feels like getting spammed with chain emails from the afterlife. “Forward this to 10 friends or a ghost will crawl through your router!” It’s less a horror movie and more a PSA about bandwidth throttling.
The scariest part of the film isn’t the ghosts, or the apocalyptic imagery of abandoned cities—it’s the realization that someone greenlit not one, but two sequels to this thing. That’s right, Pulse 2 and Pulse 3 exist, proving that Hollywood’s real curse isn’t supernatural—it’s contractual.
Final Verdict
Pulse (2006) is cinematic malware. It infects your brain with boredom, drains your will to live, and spreads the kind of apathy only a lifeless remake can generate. Kristen Bell is wasted, Ian Somerhalder sulks, Christina Milian disappears, and Wes Craven’s name is dragged through the mud like a corrupted file.
The ghosts aren’t scary, the tape is laughable, and the themes are as shallow as a YouTube buffering screen. Instead of exploring alienation in the digital age, it explores how to waste 90 minutes of yours.
1 out of 5 haunted modems.
