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Rev Horror

Host

Dir. Rob Savage (2020)

A group of friends get together for a seance via video chat and things don't go as well as they planned.


Fifty years from now, movie audiences will have no fucking clue what was going on in the early 2020's. Filmmaking during the COVID pandemic was wildly different from anything that happened before or afterwards, as global panic and lockdowns forced movie makers to get creative in their storytelling in order to continue to make their art. Thankfully, creatives tend to be creative, and while the films coming out of this era were definitely different than what came before, they were often incredibly well done and entertaining despite the severe limitations. The most notable of these films was director Rob Savage's 2020 film Host, a horror film that takes full advantage of the lockdowns themselves by throwing audiences (and its characters) into a terrifying and timely supernatural fear generator.


Friends Haley (Haley Bishop), Jemma (Jemma Moore), Emma (Emma Louise Webb), Radina (Radina Drandova), Caroline (Caroline Ward), and Teddy (Teddy Linard) have gathered via Zoom call in order to try to stay in contact despite being on lockdown and confined to their homes. They decide to do a digital seance with medium Seylan (Seylan Baxter), and things go almost immediately awry when Teddy is forced to leave by his girlfriend and Seylan is suddenly disconnected from the call. Supernatural events begin to unfold as the group watches on, and the girls quickly realize that their very lives are in danger from whatever presence has made itself known.

The use of the actors' real names for their characters adds an extra layer of realism to the film, which already felt so terrifyingly accurate in an age where all communication happened this way. Host's depiction of people in different dark rooms allows for all sorts of camera trickery and psychological fear. The audience is constantly looking into the background to see what's lurking in the dark, and Savage does a tremendous job of playing with webcam technology in creating a movie that was incredibly effective, especially on release.

It's a simple film, too, and sometimes the best horror movies are. There's not a whole lot of special effects, there are no huge setpieces. Host is just five girls in a room dealing with paranormal events that are happening around them, and it's done in a way that was exceptionally relevant to the social events occurring in the world at the time in which it was made. That is, ultimately, the only thing that really holds the film back from becoming a classic beyond the cult hit it already was. Will the film be as impactful in ten years as it was when it was made? Is it even as impactful now?

Whenever I review a film, I make sure that I watch it again to both refresh my memory and to give it a fair look. Host is still a fantastic film, to be sure, but it does lack some of the significance that it had upon release. It's still scary, though, and while it doesn't resonate quite like it did before, it's still got some great technohorror elements that are impactful in an increasingly digital age. There are some excellent effects here, especially in a time where people could barely come together to actually do them. The actresses are all excellent, each one incredibly believable as friends who are in over their heads. And, ultimately, it's an impressively scary film, which is what matters more than anything. Despite the changes in the world since the film was made, it's impactful enough that it's a good watch anyway.


Who this movie is for: Found footage fans, Technohorror lovers, Zoom stockholders

Bottom line: Host is a legitimately scary movie that will be almost impossible to duplicate after the world in which it was made has ceased to exist. The supernatural elements are handled perfectly, the actors all do a fantastic job in their roles (as basically themselves), and the effects used within are believable and realistic. In a world in which every form of communication was just like that in the film, it was the horror film that the world needed at that time. While it does lack a little bit of the punch that it had in 2020, it's still a fantastic film that everyone should see. And with a short runtime of just under an hour, it won't even take that long to check it out.



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