Shudder’s HOST (2020) Review
One of the great things about the horror genre is the way in which its movies, whether intentional or not at all, tend to be a time capsule reflection of whatever was going on in the world at the time in which they were made. Since the earliest beginnings of the genre, filmmakers have used the horror movie to reflect and exorcise fears, anxieties and headline-making social issues, with horror movies often tackling those realities head-on long before they seep into other types of movies. So it should probably come as no surprise that mere months into a pandemic that has kept us all at home in lock-down, there’s already a horror movie for 2020.
Filmed, edited, and released onto Shudder in a matter of months, director Rob Savage’s Host is the latest film to come along in the post-found footage “screenlife” sub-genre, with the entirety of the story playing out across the various computer screens of its characters. More specifically, the supernatural horror movie takes place entirely on the video chat platform Zoom, centered on a group of young female friends who attempt to make contact with the other side through the internet. Of course, this being a horror movie and all, it’s not long before their Virtual Ouija experiment results in the conjuring of a malevolent demon.
Easily the most impressive example of pandemic-fueled filmmaking ingenuity so far, the 60-minute Host began its life as a short film Savage uploaded to Twitter, which was punctuated with a jump scare. Story goes that Shudder GM Craig Engler saw the viral short and reached out to Savage about expanding upon it, and here we are less than four months later with the finished product proving itself to be a bona fide indie sensation in the horror community. And it’s not hard to see why, as Savage’s Host, armed with that same DIY spirit of found footage forebears The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, is a highly effective scare-fest.
Most everyone who sits down to watch Host has probably at one time or another busted out that Parker Brothers Ouija Board for a spooky night with friends, and Host essentially upgrades that fright-filled experience not just for current times but for 2020 specifically. It’s hard to imagine a more of-the-times horror movie being released right now, as its characters are socially distanced from one another and only able to communicate through their computer screens. And while it’s true that we’ve seen this type of movie before — other movies that call the “screenlife” subgenre home include The Den, Unfriended and Searching — there’s something particularly potent about the way in which Host uses the Zoom platform that we’ve all become intimately familiar with as a fresh new point of access.
Not only is Host’s short-and-sweet runtime born out of the Zoom platform’s inherent time restrictions, but Savage also cleverly uses the technology for a handful of moments that help his “screenlife” film stand out from the pack. One of Host’s more inventive scares plays around with Zoom’s face filters, with a creepy mask floating in a character’s living room and clearly being worn by an entity that itself cannot actually be seen. The idea of a computer registering a “face” that isn’t visible by the naked eye is a chilling one, and so too is Savage’s repeated use of another character’s Zoom background. Early in the film it’s established that she’s filmed a video of herself walking around her room and looped it for a fun Zoom background, and the background later looms over the proceedings as a haunting reminder that the character is no longer with us. It’s sad and creepy in equal measure.
When it’s not exploiting 2020 technology as a means to unnerve, Host is pretty content with hammering you across the head with a series of jump scares, with the suspense of the first half giving way to a second half that’s loaded with loud noises and in-your-face scares. The dishes exploding out of the cabinets. A character being dragged through a doorway by an unseen force. A scary demon face lunging towards the camera. We’ve seen all these moments before in other found footage movies, but it’s to Savage’s credit that the scares tend to be quite effective all the same — particularly, I would recommend, if you’re watching the movie on a laptop with your headphones on, the volume up, and the lights completely turned off. Horror fans can decry jump scares all they want but there’s a reason they remain a staple of the genre. When done right, they just plain work. And here, they often do.
One of the biggest reasons the scares work so well in Host is because the cast is all around excellent. Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova, Caroline Ward and Edward Linard not only sell the terror of the proceedings but they also do a great job endearing us to characters the movie doesn’t give us much time to get to know. With such a likable cast of characters and strong chemistry between them, it hardly even matters that an hour isn’t quite enough time to both build out characters and tell a story that’s loaded with scares. It’s enough, quite frankly, that we like these people and we don’t want to see bad things happen to them. With committed performances, the cast makes it look easy.
Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity before it, Host is the right movie that’s come along at the right time, using tried and true horror staples to terrify us all while we’re stuck at home during one of the scariest, weirdest times any of us have ever lived through. It’s Horror Movie 101 material with a 2020 twist to it, reminding that sometimes — oftentimes, actually — the most effective horror is the simplest horror. It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you jump, and best of all, you’ll have a good time the whole way through. And who knows, maybe it’ll even inspire a new crop of filmmakers to pick up the nearest camera, call up their friends, and make a horror movie of their own. Even during a pandemic, horror can find a way.
And maybe the next great horror movie is the one you make.
