Pulse

As university students we use the internet for everything. Emails, Skype, Wikipedia… we can’t escape our electronic encyclopedia of everything. Through Facebook our friends have been digitized into forms we can access on the go and through Flickr we can download memories of everywhere we have been. Could you imagine if that all turned against us?

Pulse (2001) was directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Characters start to disappear when ghosts start to invade the real world through the internet. Webcams mysteriously show the grisly deaths of the Tokyo residents as they are whittled down to only a few survivors. 

The movie’s themes surround the loneliness of life within the digital age. Could you imagine interacting only with Facebook profile for your entire life? They would feel like ghosts – transient and all knowing. This is what terrified audiences when they watch Pulse. We are already within the grasp of the internet’s control. Wait until the ghosts start coming through.

Killer BOB

A psychopathic killer who feeds on pleasure and fear inhabits your body, what do you do? Pull out your hair? Call the police? Or maybe call FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper? It’s all a mystery when it comes to Killer BOB and the town of Twin Peaks. Throughout the television series that was later expanded upon in a movie, Killer BOB is the main antagonist, but his real purpose is a mystery.

Fire Walk With Me (1992) is the prequel to the television series Twin Peaks. It was a chance for David Lynch, the series’ director, to expand upon the mythos the series created. Killer BOB was played by Frank Silva who got the role after he accidentally trapped himself inside one of the sets. When he told David Lynch of his experience, Lynch had an image of Silva at the foot of Laura Palmer’s bed and thus he became BOB.

What makes BOB scary is his ability to drive anyone he inhabits mad. The murderer of Laura Palmer – the girl who takes centre spot in the mystery of Twin Peaks – was killed by someone possessed by this wandering familiar. Fire Walk With Me slowly builds his character up giving him more and more power over the townsfolk and in the climax we find out who murdered Laura, and we get to see how.

Cesare

Cesare is a somnambulist in other words he’s a sleepwalker. What makes this character so terrifying is that he’s under the complete control of his master Dr. Caligari. Cesare carries out his master’s will with almost no volition of his own until he is released and he kidnaps a woman named Jane. Up until that point in the film, the audience is left captivated by Cesare’s stare, his mannerisms and his almost zombie-like appearance.

Hector

Bandaged and bloodied, the killer in Timecrimes (2007) seems to be everywhere at once. He’s in the woods, he’s in the house, he seems to know exactly where you’re going to be, but that’s the point as you find out in the movie’s climax. Imagine a serial killer was coming after you and they knew everything, and because of a time loop.

The Infected

REC’s (2007) monsters are zombies, well, a kind of zombie. The movie follows a late-night news crew who are following some firefighters as they respond calls. The first call comes from a woman inside of an apartment block. When they arrive at the apartment hazmat crews suddenly arrive quarantining the building. Then the woman starts biting the members of the crew all while the camera rolls and we see the characters slowly dwindle away and turn into the infected.

Some of the most horrifying images of the film come from the almost too real way the film is shot. As a journalist myself it’s a little too scary knowing I’ve shot in places equally as dark, but not quite as zombie infested.