Sightlines · a viewing thread

Screens That Swallow You

A run of films where the screen — a pirate broadcast, a haunted website, a monitor, a late-night monster-of-the-week show — stops being a window and becomes a doorway that pulls the watcher bodily through into unreality.

Cult objects rather than crowd favorites, and mostly demanding: expect body horror, techno-dread, and quiet devastation — reach for these when you want to be unsettled and unmoored, not soothed.

• Perfect Blue (1998)
• Videodrome (1983)
• Pulse (2001)
• I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
• Ring (1998) — The J-horror cornerstone gathering dust on your list where a cursed tape kills in seven days and Sadako crawls bodily out through the TV — the literal screen-as-doorway that Pulse and Videodrome only theorize, and the one to finally pull down if those unmoored you.
• Noroi: The Curse (2005) — The found-footage dossier where a vanished paranormal journalist's last documentary IS the screen that pulls you through — piece the tapes together and the curse pieces you together, the same contagious-media dread Ring runs on.
• Chime (2024) — If Pulse's techno-dread landed, this is the recent Kiyoshi Kurosawa to pull down next — a chime no one else can hear becomes the transmission that unmoors ordinary people into sudden violence.
• Séance (2004) — A deep-cut from Pulse's own director, where a sound recordist's tape becomes the conduit for a dead girl's presence — quiet, guilt-soaked, and unmistakably of this thread's media-as-doorway lineage.