Host (2020)
Directed by Rob Savage
Six friends hire a medium to hold a séance via Zoom during lockdown — but they get far more than they bargained for as things quickly go wrong. When an evil spirit starts invading their homes, they begin to realise they might not survive the night.
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29 films that influenced Host
What critics say influenced Host
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.
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.
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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.
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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.