Rob Savage
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Though Host certainly leans into horror movie tropes that existed before it – you can see shades of The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and Unfriended here – Host is put together with such ingenuity, particularly given the whole lockdown situation, that it’s difficult not to be somewhat in awe of what Savage and his extraordinary cast and crew have achieved.
Host builds suspense in the style of the Paranormal Activity films, strictly limiting point-of-view through laptop screens as the danger signs escalate.
Where Paranormal Activity and Cloverfield had mass audiences eating it up, the acclaim was more divided when it came to films such as The Last Exorcism and Unfriended .
Host does not bring a lot of originality to the table; in fact, it borrows quite heavily from other popular horror films, namely Paranormal Activity and Shutter .
And it’s not hard to see why, as Savage’s Host , armed with that same DIY spirit of found footage forebears The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity , is a highly effective scare-fest.
Begone Blair Witch , pack up your poltergeists Paranormal Activity , because there’s a new champion of found footage horror – one especially for the pandemic generation.
Host is not just brilliant, it's as good and as important, and in many of the same ways/for the same reasons, as The Blair Witch Project .
Like The Blair Witch Project more than 20 years before it, Host opts to use the actors’ real names, and works best because of the incredibly naturalistic performances from all the cast.
The length of a Zoom meeting in which six friends deign to embark on an online séance which goes, of course, horrifically off the rails, is as efficient a low-fi horror invention since 1999’s The Blair Witch Project allowed for a redefining moment in genre possibility.
Some eerie shots seem cribbed from the found footage landmark, The Blair Witch Project, while a pair of spooky stagings—involving flour and a blanket—recall this year’s Invisble Man.
As with The Blair Witch Project, which is still #1 when it comes to this style of homemade movies, nothing actually needs to be there in the darkness for us, as viewers, to let our imaginations run wild trying to see it.
Director Rob Savage (who also cowrote with Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepard) makes one nod to The Blair Witch Project, by having the actors use their own names for the characters.
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).
Taking heavy inspiration from films like the underrated Unfriended , the masterful Searching , and the underseen The Den , Host takes the seemingly innocuous activity of a Zoom group chat and devilishly twists it into one of the scariest films of the year.
Films like Unfriended , The Den , Cam2Cam , and more have paved the way for an entire subgenre of at-home, by-yourself filmmaking that needn't backlot sets nor in-person crews.
Ejemplos que me vienen a la mente: Unfriended y su secuela, Searching, The Den, y muchas más.
And while it’s true that we’ve seen this type of movie before — other movies that call the “screenlife” subgenre home include The Den , Unfriended and Searching — there’s something particularly potent about the way in which Host uses the Zoom platform that we’ve all become intimately familiar with as a fresh new point of access.
While this is not exactly new (see: The Den , Unfriended ), it can still be a fun ride for the audience when done well.
“With an Evil Dead energy and a lead performance inspired by Bruce Campbell’s Ash, Dashcam ‘s video game appeal uses VFX trickery and fearless improv to create an experience akin to a wild ride at an abandoned theme park.
This time around, Savage channels the manic energy of Evil Dead and the REC series for a bloody and bizarre feast for the senses.
This trio would thrive with something akin to “The Evil Dead” considering the practical effects in “Dashcam” earn high marks, including a memorable gory decapitation.
"Dashcam" invites us to spend a full hour with one of the worst characters ever captured on a screen; a nails-on-chalkboard individual who shrieks and freestyle raps her way through a series of increasingly gruesome scenarios that owe a debt to the original "The Evil Dead."
Going from a more Paranormal Activity leaning supernatural found footage story over zoom to a madcap found footage horror comedy that feels in line with something like The Evil Dead .
I was reminded of Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm’s words from Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World as Savage and company dial up the terrors with perfectly paced increasing intensity.
Bebergal is referring to the appearance of the Ark of the Covenant in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark .
The ghost here has the pale and high-contrast look reminscent of Japanese horror like Ringu or Ju On.
A pesar de no ser un intento explícito de jugar con la transmisión contagiosa del mal a través de la pantalla (como claramente sucede en Ringu de 1998, Antrum de 2018 y Sinister de Scott Derrickson), Host mantiene una inquietud siempre presente en el espectador.
But the more overt influence here seems to be 1992 British Halloween special Ghostwatch.
But despite these similarities, Host perhaps shares the most DNA with an even earlier found footage frightfest: Ghostwatch .
All 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.
That said, Azrael does suffer from its ambitions at some point. While Rob Savage's Host is hardly a thematic or storytelling comparison, the filmmaker's approach to miniaturized concepts relates to Katz's gritty-as-sin tale. Host clocks in at 54 minutes, running leaner and nastier than if it had…
Y todo esto es un coqueteo tiene mucho que ver con la vieja herencia del found footage desde Cannibal Holocaust (1980) hasta REC (2007) pasando por The Blair Witch Project (1999) (que aquí tiene varias citas puntuales con moco y cámara cercana) y la olvidada Incident in Lake County (1998).
As the mostly-absent medium, Seylan Baxter (one of the witches from Justin Kurzel’s re-staging of Macbeth in 2015) is also effective, for it’s not so much the ludicrousness of this environment or these beliefs, but channeling the proper mood when we understand and empathize with those who do.
Screen-based horror is nothing new; both of the Unfriended films have received quite the critical reappraisal, and Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching is a riveting multi-media thriller set entirely against a MacBook screen.
Much like the inventive and efficiently paced Searching (2018) starring Jon Cho, Host takes place completely within the confines of an online platform, incorporating, as best it can, the limitations of such technologies for communication.
Mientras Searching (2018) es un thriller encantador muy bien llevado por John Cho y con la extraña magia de Timur Bergmambetov en la producción, Open Window (2014) de Vigalondo fue una completa decepción en la gran carrera del gran director español.
Movies like 2018’s Searching and the Unfriended duo of releases have shown that you can have a film mostly play out on a social networking service.
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).
I can’t recall the last time a lone scene from a horror movie legitimately gave me chills (it was probably the final scene of 2020’s Shudder surprise, Host ), but Caveat got me good.
Mientras Cam (2018) resultó una maravillosa e inquietante crítica a la prostitución en línea, Unfriended (2014) es todo lo que esperas de una película palomera que no innova absolutamente nada y que se cuelga, únicamente, de la pretendida novedad del formato.
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).
For everyone else, HOST may conjure memories of both 2015’s UNFRIENDED, which used Facebook/Skype technology to similar effect, and the original 2007 PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, which was creepy despite a tight budget and relatively few locations.
El clásico momento “look behind you” que inmortalizó, como gran metarreferencia, Wes Craven en Scream se convierte aquí en una pesadilla tecnológica.
What if, like James Stewart in Rear Window , you see someone suffering a terrible fate but can’t do anything to stop it?
Unlike some ‘internet’ horror films which find it hard to keep up with changing tech and become awkwardly outdated before they are even released – 2010s Chatroom being the most obvious example – Host feels gloriously fresh.
Like Leigh Whannel's The Invisible Man , Host is about an unseen killer hunting us in isolation.
The cinema verite obstructions of its production, meanwhile, recall The Blair Witch Project; like Myrick and Sanchez, director Rob Savage never shared a physical space with his actors, and left them to stage their own scares and effects within their own houses, opting (albeit by necessity) to pull the strings from afar.