Host (2020)

Movie: Host (2020), directed by Rob Savage

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 7.05 miles, 9’23”/mile, 01:06:08 (slow recovery run)

 

I only had time to squeeze in a quick movie during my recovery run tonight, folks, because it’s FAMILY ZOOM NIGHT! And what better way to prepare for that terrifying prospect than to check out the first (sort-of-)feature-length horror flick shot entirely in Zoom during COVID-19 lockdown? Yes, tonight’s movie was Host, Shudder’s exclusive socially distanced paranormal freakout, and it is a masterclass in how to make good things come in small packages. Clocking in at under an hour, Host delivers some solid scares and then gets gone while the getting’s good.

 

The premise is bare-bones, as befits such a short piece: six friends on pandemic lockdown get together on Zoom and bring in a psychic to have some fun with a virtual seance. Almost none of them takes it seriously, going so far as to secretly mock the medium with a drinking game. Their cavalier attitude, however, leads to a demonic entity swooping in after they’ve opened the gates to the astral plane (drink!) to mess with them in increasingly scary and violent ways. After that it’s just a matter of seeing whether any of them survives long enough to see the Zoom meeting hit its free membership time limit.

 

I’m pretty sure the notion of confining a horror film entirely to what happens on a computer screen was pioneered by Unfriended in 2014, and in my admittedly incomplete experience, it hadn’t been done better since. Host might have changed that, though a direct comparison is unfair, since the two films are very different animals. Unfriended is a ghost story that’s really about teens using social media to be awful to each other in ever more efficient ways, which might limit its most affected audience to a certain demographic. Host, on the other hand, uses the entire Zoom experience as the foundation of anxiety upon which it builds its terror.

 

It’s an obvious strategy, maybe, but no less brilliant for that: so many people now suddenly rely on this platform on a daily basis for school and work, as well as for whatever ersatz virtual “happy hours” that pass for socialization but are now indistinguishable from, um, school and work. And everything else universally associated with lockdown—the loneliness of isolation, the claustrophobia of being trapped with a housemate, the often unspoken but internalized fear of an invisible and unstoppable killer—has become inextricably intertwined in the collective unconscious with the rites and rituals of the Zoom call. It’s a fat vein to tap.

 

What this means is that everything about Host’s slow build is recognizable, relatable, and sets one’s teeth on edge: the privacy tape being peeled off the webcam, the horrible feedback when someone joins the meeting on a laptop when she’s already connected on her smartphone, people trying too hard to seem happy, people trying too hard to be seen living fabulous lifestyles in fabulous locales. Host is not about escapism. The “characters” are using their actors’ real names. There’s a lot of drinking, a cohabitant getting snippy and banishing himself to the bedroom, and an elderly relative playing fast and loose with the distancing guidelines. By the time the spooky stuff kicks in, you’re already worked up over the horror of what real life has become—yours and everybody else’s.

 

When the really demonic action begins, it’s effective. Part of that is because you can never really be sure of what you see over a highly compressed Internet video feed. Host’s Zoom format also yields some genuinely unique and brilliant touches, such as the way a custom Zoom video background serves as an obscuring curtain so we can’t see the real horror behind it; it sets up the right kind of jump scare, while also letting us appreciate the irony of the looping video showing the character still alive and walking mundanely around her apartment. Also note the use of novelty Snap filters both for comedic and horrific effect (as they are applied over terrified and dying faces) and for plot (when Snap applies a filter to a face it’s detected in midair when no one’s visible on camera).

 

I don’t mean to say that Host is a perfect movie overall, but it deftly exploits our newly-shared expectations, frustrations, and dread of what passes for human interaction in Zoom, and hangs it all on the skeleton that is the underlying horror of every aspect of 2020’s “new normal.” I have a theory about why the reaction to Host has been so polarized: people who applaud it have accepted and assimilated the nightmare a certain little virus has made of all of our lives, while people who write it off as “just another found-footage ghost story” are still in denial about just how much higher the bodies will be piled. Which one are you? If you have 56 minutes to spare, I know how you can find out.

 

If nothing else, it might make your Family Zoom Night seem less scary by comparison.