Pulse Remake Sets Dave Boyle to Direct for Screen Gems
Screen Gems and Spyglass are developing a new Pulse remake with Dave Boyle directing and Parker Finn producing through Bad Feeling.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse is returning through a new English language reimagining from Sony’s Screen Gems and Spyglass Media Group. Dave Boyle is attached to direct the project, which remains in early development and does not yet have a cast or release date.
Boyle will also revise a screenplay originally written by Luke Piotrowski, whose credits include The Night House. Parker Finn and Jonathan Fass are producing through Bad Feeling, the company behind Finn’s Smile films, with Spyglass also producing.
What the New Pulse Remake Has in Place
Boyle arrives at the project after directing the Japanese crime series House of Ninjas and the drama Tokyo Cowboy, while his horror film Never After Dark expands his work in the genre. His experience telling stories set in Japan could prove especially important for a film whose identity is inseparable from Kurosawa’s original setting and cultural moment.
Released in 2001, Pulse follows people confronting disappearances, isolation and a mysterious online presence as the boundary between the living and the dead begins to collapse. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and became one of the defining works of Japanese horror from that era, using technology less as a mechanical threat than as a doorway into loneliness.
Why Pulse Still Matters
An American remake arrived in 2006, but the new version has an opportunity to engage with a world that has moved much closer to the fears Kurosawa explored. Online life is no longer a separate place people visit. It shapes relationships, work and identity, which makes the original film’s connection between constant access and profound isolation feel even more immediate.
What We Think
Another remake of a respected Japanese horror film will understandably create skepticism, particularly when the original remains so singular, but the creative team gives this version a more interesting starting point than a simple title revival. Boyle’s experience with Japanese stories and Finn’s proven understanding of modern studio horror suggest that the filmmakers know the atmosphere matters as much as the ghosts.
The central question is whether this Pulse can translate the original film’s quiet despair without sanding it down into a conventional supernatural thriller. If Screen Gems and Spyglass preserve that emotional core while finding a contemporary reason to revisit it, the story may be even more relevant now than it was twenty five years ago.
Sources: Deadline, Dread Central
