Foreign Frights
A Tale of Two Sisters
Pulse
When it came time to make my selections for this month of double features, I had the supreme challenge of narrowing down a dense list of horror films that all apparently deserve my viewership. I needed unique, inventive scary movies that could still send a chill down my spine—even as an overstimulated, desensitized, long-time fan of this genre. The goal for this week was to find films that were just. plain. scary. No particular vibe or flavor of fear was required, just that unavoidable sense of terror that can reach you anywhere—even from underneath the blanket you watch behind. Though this week could have gone in a multitude of different directions, I sought out two films that have been on my watchlist for years, and they did not disappoint. This batch of foreign frights come from South Korea and Japan, where many impeccable storytellers reside and where great horror films seemingly grow on trees. First up is the critically-acclaimed film from Kim Jee-woon that has made essentially every “must watch horror film” list, the 2003 horror classic A Tale of Two Sisters. When this film was first released, it became the highest-grossing Korean film of all time and the first to be screened in American theaters—a rarity among horror films, especially of this caliber. A Tale of Two Sisters is the kind of horror film that makes use of both psychological torment and tangible jump scares, a combination of fears that feels inescapably horrifying, when done correctly. A Tale of Two Sisters follows Soo-mi and Soo-yeon after a traumatic event involving the death of their mother, and in the wake of their grief they experience some very strange happenings in their once happy home. *Stefan voice* This film has everything: an evil stepmom, creepy kids, and every fear you can conceptualize becomes corporeal and very, very real. Horror master Kim Jee-woon, along with this brilliant cast, created an environment of fear so distinct and refined that I cannot compare it to any other horror movie-watching experience. Though themes of this film have been echoed in movies like The Uninvited and Goodnight Mommy, neither of these pieces of cinema can hold a candle to the horror of A Tale of Two Sisters. Both subtle and severe, and full of twists and turns I guarantee you won’t see coming, A Tale of Two Sisters is a triumph of terror that tries—and succeeds—to torment its audience every chance it gets. With an enchanting score and a beguiling set up, there’s a lot of fun and fear to be had here. Just in the tortuous way that A Tale of Two Sisters taunted me, the Japanese film Pulse found even more inventive ways to scare the shit out of me. Unlike the silky score of A Tale of Two Sisters, Pulse offered a disorienting, even distracting soundtrack that only added to the unsettlement. This, if anything, was my only grievance with Pulse, and every other detail of this film was utilized perfectly. Released in 2001 to an audience of people who’d just survived the paranoia of Y2K, Pulse is a techno thriller that was, as you’ll soon find out, incredibly ahead of its time. Pulse takes place in Tokyo, during the boom of home computers and the rise of the internet, and plays on the fears surrounding technology that we still face today. Isolation, loneliness, and the concern that the force of the internet is too powerful to control: these are all brought up when we discuss the dangers of technological accessibility and advancement, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film found disturbing ways to play with these troubling possibilities. Pulse invites us to imagine a mysterious phenomenon that keeps appearing on people’s computers: a website that offers users a chance to meet ghosts. Horrifying as that is, when these ghosts are met, they are impossible to escape, and very easily spread—like a virus. Years before the internet became so insidiously toxic, and decades before the pandemic began, Pulse created a palpable climate of technological and biological fear that feels entirely attainable. Ghosts and technology work surprisingly well together, and this high-concept, high-anxiety film expertly made use of these themes by playing into some of humanity’s greatest fears: death and being alone. Pulse was far more existential and deep than any other horror film I’ve seen in recent years, and frightening imagery aside, it brought so many new and terrifying ideas to the table—which is oh-so-hard to come by. This Inverse article explains the efficacy of this film’s concept better than I ever could, but Pulse really does feel like a one-of-a-kind piece of scary cinema, often replicated but never quite mastered in the way it is in the original. Similarly to A Tale of Two Sisters, Pulse provides a sense of both mental and physical terror that cannot be explained—only experienced. Out of all of the films I’ve viewed this month, and perhaps in the span of this entire cinematic odyssey, Pulse and A Tale of Two Sisters might be the scariest. I encourage my fellow scary movie fans to gather a group of friends, family, animals, or anything else that might make you feel safe, and watch these two non-Western horror films—for the sake of broadening your horror horizons and expanding your sense of fear. These films may be foreign to you, but the scares they serve up are all too familiar. Happy haunting, my spooky friends. 👻
