Key to the effectiveness of Host is its immediacy: not just of the film’s explicit setting amid the conditions of the pandemic lockdown in which it was also remotely filmed but also of its apparent unfolding in real time (although in multiple spaces).
So the familiarity in which Savage grounds his horror is the videotelephony technology which has formed a fundamental part of our social interactions over these last months – a gemütlich if glitchy platform which mediates our hopes and fears. Eventually others would pick up this technologically driven subspecies of ‘found footage’, leading to films like Zachary Donohue’s The Den (aka Hacked, 2013), Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows (2014), Leo Gabriadze’s Unfriended (2014), Branden Kramer’s Ratter (2015), Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching (2018), Timur Bekmambetov’s Profile (2018) and Stephen Susco’s Unfriended: Dark Web (2018).Ĭo-written by Savage, Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd (with much improvisation from the cast), Host picks up the ‘webcam horror’ ball and rolls it further down the hallway, updating itself to the conference-calling capabilities of Zoom which, though available since 2013, has come into its own (and into all our homes) during this year’s Covid-19 crisis. Made before Skype had become mainstream, and before Youtube had even launched, Costanza’s prescient piece saw the potential for using a computer screen as the ‘live medium’ for intradiegetic camerawork, breaking down the comfortable barrier between horror’s viewers and characters. Much as the actors who play these six (Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Caroline Ward, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb and Edward Linard – the first three of whom were also in Savage’s 2016 short Dawn of the Deaf) and lend them their forenames also conjure between them a credibly cosy friendship, the characters too will conjure from the ether a mischievously malevolent spirit (played by Frankenstein’s Creaturehimself, James Swanton) which insidiously transforms the safe-seeming interiors of their homes into a hallucinatory, hellish hangout space.Īll this can be traced back to Michael Constanza’s groundbreaking low-budget The Collingswood Story (2002), whose footage is confined to the webcam view of two students in a long-distance relationship and the sinister psychic whom they contact online. All these meanings will come into play in Rob Savage’s Host, in which six friends, bored by the isolation of lockdown and eager for any kind of stimulation, agree to take part in an online séance run by the medium Seylan (Seylan Baxter). The word ‘host’ can refer equally to anyone accommodating a houseguest, to the organiser of a group webchat, or to a person who has become possessed.
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