Someone, perhaps John Carpenter, once said that to make a good horror film, it helps to be a bit of a sadist. True enough, if your idea of horror is whacking teenage girls with a cleaver. But if, like "Kairo (Pulse)" director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, you're making a film about the dead invading the world of the living, it helps to believe, in your worst nightmares if nowhere else, that all this stuff about otherworldly entities might be for real. In other words, no scare in the filmmaker, no scare in the audience.

From the evidence of the film, as well as of his previous work ("Door III," "Cure," "Oi Naru Gensho," "Charisma"), Kurosawa must have had some unquiet dreams indeed and remembered them with unusual vividness. How else to explain the strange, shivery sense of conviction in these films, the unsettling feeling that, no matter how bizarre it gets on the screen, the filmmaker is not simply pushing our buttons, but giving us a slice of his less-than-sunny inner life? Creative types are always being asked where it comes from. In Kurosawa's case, maybe it's better not to know.

But to really put the scare across, to make the audience still see the world on the screen when they walk out of the theater, the filmmaker also has to be a storyteller and craftsman. Kurosawa is stronger as the latter than the former, producing chilling effects with the most ordinary of materials (in "Kairo" he gets a lot of mileage from red duct tape), while at times letting the story sag, or sink out of sight altogether.