The seance goes about as well as any seance goes in a horror movie, though Host is far from typical in its brilliance and unique execution. One of the friends, the uptight but justified Hayley (Haley Bishop), sets up the meeting as an “online seance,” calling in a medium to provide some low-key thrills for her friends. Host’s premise revolves around a group of friends meeting up on Zoom to stay in touch while social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. Savage is no stranger to tight scripting, having drawn critical acclaim for his previous horror shorts Dawn of the Deaf (2016) and Salt (2017), but Host stands out as remarkable for getting a full film’s worth of plot within the external time constraint of a non-subscription Zoom call. The movie uses every single minute to set up its characters, foreshadowing, and twists while still leaving time for screamingly violent horror goodness. Noting that Host is “almost” full length is not to designate it as a short, but to acknowledge how much story gets packed into a run time of under an hour. (opens in a new tab) (Opens in a new tab) Three months later, Savage released Host, an (almost) full length movie on the streaming platform Shudder, which expands his prank into one of 2020’s best examples of transmuting the spooky realities of technology, coronavirus, and that one dumb friend into timely, escapist entertainment. In April 2020, British writer-director Rob Savage pranked his friends via Zoom with a terrifyingly clever live jump scare and captured their reactions on Twitter.
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