In short: Host (2020)

Corona virus lockdown. Haley (Haley Bishop – in classical POV horror pseudo-authenticity manner, every actor uses their actual first name) invites a handful of her friends (Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova, Caroline Ward and Edward Linard) to hold a séance via Zoom with a real medium (Seylan Baxter). To not a single audience member’s surprise, it’s all fun and games until they accidentally conjure up something very nasty indeed.

As a horror fan, nay, as any fan of good commercial fun, I’m practically honour-bound to approve of a good gimmick. And what better and more timely gimmick can a film have than being produced following all lock-down rules and measures by having been shot via Zoom? Never mind that the group chat movie is by now a little sub-sub-genre of the POV horror style, this one’s a Corona Virus group chat movie after all! And seriously, it’s still a pretty good gimmick even if it isn’t as original as the film’s marketing suggests, and it’s certainly a nice way for filmmakers to still keep making something amounting to movies right now without risking anyone’s health.

Apart from an eye for the gimmick and the practical, director Rob Savage also shows a more than decent understanding of how to construct a movie about a séance gone wrong, how to time shocks. Host also has the distinction of being a film that knows how long it needs to be, clocking in at under sixty minutes, the filmmakers having excised all kinds of needless guff and feet-dragging until Host becomes something akin to the pure distillation of a one-idea movie: a film that knows what’s good about it, what it’s good at, and proceeds to get in fast and out just as quickly. It’s rather impressive.


Of course, this also leads to a film that’s more a campfire tale than an actual story, lacking characters, themes and subtext. It’s a damn good campfire tale, though, and well-told, so who am I to complain?