Host film shudder9/12/2023 Where the meat of Host lies, however, is in its scares. At only 56 minutes, there’s barely time for character development or any kind of shading, but the entire cast is naturally charismatic, and it’s easy to buy into their friendship, chemistry, and in some cases, underlying tension. When the other participants are less than respectful of the process, the ritual inadvertently summons a malevolent entity that preys upon them, one by one. Taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of friends gather online for a weekly Zoom call where one member of the chat, Haley (Haley Bishop), has hired a medium to conduct a séance. Keeping it at the typical session duration of an hour, the film is an abbreviated breath of fresh air, even when its scares don’t land 100% of the time. Taking a page from the “screenlife” sub-genre of horror thrillers - films such as Unfriended, Searching, and The Den - Host extrapolates the timely Zoom conceit of Savage’s video and fleshes it out with plot and characters. In the wake of his viral prank, Savage then pitched an expanded and scripted version to horror streaming service Shudder, thus giving birth to Host. The video scared the hell out of his friends, and also, millions of people on the Internet. On April 21st, director Rob Savage ( Dawn of the Deaf) uploaded a two-minute snippet of a Zoom call to Twitter in the short clip, he investigates strange footsteps he hears from his attic, capping it off with a jump scare spliced in from 2007’s Spanish horror film, REC. While it doesn’t reinvent horror or even the “screenlife” subgenre, Host gets by with a bevy of unsettling, clever, and economical choices, all within the space of a single Zoom call. Expanded from director Rob Savage’s two-minute viral video on Twitter, Host is a bite-sized horror treat that comes at the perfect time.
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