Host
SHUDDERIn the time of Coronavirus, it’s pretty clear who the real enemy is. Ghosts are nothing compared to a deadly infection, made clear in Rob Savage’s Zoom nightmare of a movie, Host. Two winking nods to the world’s current predicament include Savage’s characters remembering their masks, even when running outside to confront an evil spirit and bumping elbows in the same room as said spirit. That’s not to mention that the hour-long film takes place over the course of one spooky Zoom meeting.
Full of glitches, bad connections and freaky strangers, Zoom is a scary place already. Savage simply turns up the heat, concocting a seance between six friends and one astral guide that’s already a little far-fetched; who in their right mind would do such a thing, as if the world isn’t scary enough? It could have had a little more resonance if, for example, one of the attendees wanted to commune with a grandparent killed by Covid. Alas, no such thematic meaning is to be found in Host, and the intriguing set-up turns out to be little more than window dressing for a few good scares.
In spite of the film’s misleading tagline: “Someone new has joined the meeting”, Host is more or less just an excuse for a motley of nefarious goings-on to scare the living daylights out of its main characters. Instead of a ghost literally joining the Zoom meeting as one might infer, the audience bears witness to the hauntings, one-by-one, of each of the meeting’s members. It’s not any more effective than a pre-Covid haunting film, but it is an effective way to tear an innovative premise asunder.
It is often said that budgetary or physical constraints are a pathway to creativity but, unfortunately, Host proves the maxim wrong. While the sheer willpower and effects-work required to make the movie is admirable, the filmmakers’ efforts were somewhat in vain. There is not much that one could be comfortable calling original in Savage’s film, especially given that the whole “movie taking place in a screen” has been done pre-quarantine in films such as Unfriended and Searching – with far more finesse in, at least, the latter.
Cheap jump scares, bad decisions and vague terror abound here. Characters wander, seemingly in a daze, from dark room to dark room, and any sympathy that an audience might have for a person whose Zoom “glazed look” has become literalised through tears will quickly evaporate. The moment when Caroline (Caroline Ward), the character most apprehensive about the seance, heads straight towards danger with no hesitation is the precise moment when the film loses its realism. And that’s all the more unfortunate because, other than its characters, the movie effectively replicates a real-life Zoom environment. There’s even a 40-minute time limit alert towards the end of the film. This might be one of the few films where it’s advisable to watch on a computer, so as to simulate being in a Zoom meeting.
While nothing special, Host has its own unique charm to it, due primarily to its cast being game and the short runtime. It’s hard to get too angry at a film that clocks in at less than an hour and never bores. As a form of escapism, the horror genre can work if its scares are at least more terrifying than those in the real world. Host is very much not that type of film, not only because of its tired horror mechanics but also because it reminds its viewers that even a demon isn’t as scary as forgetting to wear a mask. Maybe it is the film the world needs right now.
