What really helps elevate Host for me, though, is the dynamic between the characters, who all feel like genuine friends and, unlike in something like Unfriended, are people we actually enjoy spending time with. I sure can’t say I expected Zoom backgrounds to be as well utilized in a horror movie this soon, and when everyone was making the same jokes about video chat filters back in March, who would have expected a director would give us nightmares over them by July? We get the camera flash used strategically to light up a room and build suspense between shots, an eerie pan around an attic, flour being spread out on the floor to reveal footsteps, and so on.īut there are a couple of rather inventive scares in there, including at least two reliant on technology that had me giggling with delight. Host at times is essentially an extremely skillful execution of well-worn tropes from other found footage movies, rather than something that boggles our mind with its ingenuity. It is, of course, a concept we’ve seen plenty of times before, including most effectively in Unfriended, which I still maintain is far more clever than it’s given credit for.
For that alone, Host deserves massive props. But no, Host is a made-from-home movie that truly delivers the goods, not coming across like much of a step down from a Blumhouse film that wasn’t produced in the middle of a damn global pandemic. One might assume the film would be forced to take an extremely minimalist approach given the major limitations, having a lot of the horror playing out in our minds. In fact, it might just leave you itching for more Zoom horror.įrom a production standpoint first and foremost, it’s downright wild how much director Rob Savage and his crew was able to accomplish here while working entirely from their own individual houses. The new Shudder original, which follows six friends who hold a seance over Zoom during the coronavirus pandemic and somehow came together from beginning to end starting in April of this very year, is quite impressive and a total blast. How the heck did they pull this off? How can a horror movie that not only was shot entirely over Zoom, but didn’t even exist as a concept a little over three months ago, be as satisfying as Host?
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