Host Review (Short Film, 2020)

content warning: death by suicide

Host is an original short horror film from writer/director Rob Savage and writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd. I got drawn in by the promise of a Zoom horror film and got so much more than I expected.

For those of you fortunate enough not to have to use it, Zoom is an online chatting app. Most school programs in the US, as well as many businesses, began using Zoom when the COVID-19 quarantine began in April. It’s a surprisingly effective little program with some quirks that are increasingly more irritating as the day goes on. It’s sound reactive, meaning whatever mic is the loudest in the moment gets the focus on the screen. If you don’t have a beast of a computer, you’re stuck with the one screen at a time view driven by audio. If you’re not the host of the call, you’re at the mercy of everyone else having the common decency to mute the call or turn off their camera if they’re going to be a distraction.

Host is about a digital seance. A group of friends meet over Zoom during quarantine to have a seance led by a spiritualist. The rules are light a candle, turn off the lights, and keep a trigger object nearby to draw the attention of the astral plane. Focus on the image of being connected by a circle as if you are holding hands in the same room. Be prepared to cut ties with your own imaginary lifeline to your front door if necessary. Stay in the moment, support each other, and be respectful of the process. Naturally, a good chunk of the friend group just wants to drink and goof around, so you know we’re in for some unexpected consequences.

What happens over the next 56 minutes is a less than cathartic release from the drudges of the Zoom life. Some of what you will see is the fault of technology; some of it is the fault of human stupidity. Then you reach a point where technology and drunk young people can’t explain what’s happening onscreen anymore.

I give major credit to Rob Savage and his team on this film. As someone who was involved in multiple Zoom productions designed to salvage live performances that could not happen, I can confidently say shooting anything over Zoom is the worst. I’d rather have everyone screenrecord a FaceTime session and edit it later than record another performance on Zoom. The sound issue is awful, so you have your choice of being at the mercy of other people’s sound mixing, seeing everyone in those stacked up cubes at once, or manually scrolling and pinning windows you need to see and splicing it all together later. That’s not even getting into lag, varying camera quality, and the complete inability to say or do anything in unison.

Host leans into some of these challenges as part of the style of the film. There’s a scene where one character tells everyone else how to go into their settings and raise the audio on their speakers. Then it cuts to a single camera shot of that character wandering through her darkened apartment. She hears something and wants to prove that she’s not imagining things. The film leans into the slightly grainy quality of a webcam in the dark and the anticipation of that jumpscare created by that one hot mic coming in. Host is packed with unexpected scares that work because you’re not expecting those moments with the limitations of Zoom. It’s brilliant misdirection the whole way through.

Host’s greatest strength is its character development. The nature of a group Zoom call (people are late for a variety of reasons on every Zoom call) gives you a nice progression of new characters joining the call, being introduced, and exploring their surroundings and circumstances. You get a nice calling card for each character. Actually recording it in Zoom gives you the character names onscreen the entire time, so you always know who is onscreen. Bonus points go out to whoever did the closed captions for this, as they center the text under the character who is speaking even when seven cameras are running onscreen.

Seance gone wrong films are nothing new. Thankfully, Host brings more to the table than just the Zoom app as a cinematic device. It’s not enough to use a new piece of technology and claim it as the substance of a horror film. Even the most on trend concept still needs a good story and well planned scares. Host delivers.

Host is currently streaming on Shudder.