July 2020, while England, like many other countries in the world, is still under lockdown, Haley and her friends Jemma, Emma, Radina, Caroline and Teddy, decide to get together via Zoom, the videoconference software, in order to summon the spirits! To do so, the group will even be guided in this experience by Seylan, a so-called “professional” medium. But one of them will not respect all the rules and what should have been a joke will have unexpected consequences…
Host is “THE” horror movie of the imposed confinement following the COVID-19 epidemic and therefore of 2020. This was bound to happen because this past year, many of us have had to participate in teleconferences, whether for work, to stay in touch with family or to organize virtual aperitifs with our friends! The Zoom application has spread exponentially to the point of competing with Internet giants such as Google or Amazon! This project was born at the beginning of the first confinement on the other side of the Channel in the mind of Rob Savage helped by some of his friends. His medium-length film (about fifty minutes) is based on a short video he made in early 2020. In it, he investigates disturbing noises coming from his attic during a Zoom call. But what he didn’t tell his buddies was that a face was going to come out in front of the camera for a short time! Imagine the face of his friends! The video quickly went viral on the web so much so that Rob decided to go from short to medium length film. Host has been a great success since its release in July 2020 on the American VOD platform specialized in horror “Shudder”. What an apotheosis for what was originally a simple joke between friends via a video conferencing site!
For the record, Rob developed this project while respecting the rules of containment. He had to direct his actors from a distance and they each set up the cameras, the lights and managed the stunts themselves. The practical effects (moving doors, tables, chairs…) were also directed by the actors. The conception and the shooting of the film will have lasted in total 12 weeks for a budget which we estimate of the most reduced! Let’s add to this that even when two actresses end up doing a scene together, they put on their masks and when they finally meet again, in spite of the fear, they still have the reflex to greet each other by doing an “elbow check” that we now know only too well! The film even pushes realism to the point of ending on the famous cut at the end of the 40 free minutes!
Of course, the concept behind Host, that of limiting the setting to a computer screen, has already been used several times by horror cinema (remember the “Unfriended” franchise), but this one nevertheless benefits from the fact that its narrative evokes the reality linked to the coronavirus, which will accentuate the immersion of the spectator. Moreover, given its short duration, Host enters very quickly into the heart of the subject, which can be both good and bad because inevitably one could not adhere immediately, especially since the characters are not brushed in depth, even if there is an attempt to do it, it must be recognized: one of the girls has a fight with her boyfriend, another still lives with her father, as for the only boy of the group, he leaves the video conference because his girlfriend Jinny wants it for herself!
However, the protagonists are too caricatural (the skeptics, the freaks and the comedians), déjà-vu in short! So when, on top of that, a catalog of events inherent to old-fashioned found footage is thrown at us (a glass breaks, a chair moves on its own, a hanged man is furtively seen in an attic, bodies will be propelled in front of the camera but also out of the frame by an invisible force, or some girls will use the flash of a Polaroid to light themselves and another will end up throwing flour hoping to catch a glimpse of the hostile demon), we can only be disappointed. One rarely has the impression of seeing something that has not already been done in the last twenty years (remember that “The Blair Witch Project” was released in 1999!) and one would have liked a little more innovation. All this is a pity because there is a rather good progression in the tension, good special effects, the actors, in their reactions, are quite convincing but all this, the pure fan of horror movies, he already knows it and it becomes really difficult with age!
Mixing the “Paranormal Activity” and “Unfriended” franchises as well as their multiple successors in the found footage style of “The Den”, this medium-length film is not too bad and it fulfills the specifications quite well in terms of jump scares. Unfortunately for him, Host comes out too late in a genre that is reaching saturation: everything has already been seen and seen again and again to such an extent that we sometimes border on overdose, a bit like the slasher in its time! In fact, the film is predictable, full of clichés as much in terms of the protagonists as in terms of what is going to happen, but it is above all plagued by an obvious question: how in just three minutes, did five otherwise very nice ladies and one of their buddies, who likes to drink, manage to summon a demonic entity via their computer screen? We believe it moderately all the same! Nevertheless, let’s salute the last nice wink of the film, when it ends with the credits representing a list of the participants to the Zoom call, letting appear the names of all the people who contributed to the creation of the film. But this is a small consolation, even if 55 minutes goes by very quickly!
