“It was just to do something to feel creative during lockdown. Savage pranked his pals (including soon-to-be cast of Host) on Zoom with a short video of himself investigating strange noises in the attic, where a demonic-child-monster-thing sprang out from the darkness – a scare cribbed from Spanish found footage REC. “It’s just how we were staying sane and communicating,” says Savage. It began with them trying to pass the time like many other people during lockdown: quizzes, Zoom happy hours, and a “Quarantine Movie Club” WhatsApp group. “Rob likes to play it down,” says Jed Shepherd, “but what he’s done is build an infrastructure for a new way to make films.” “We made it sitting in our homes via Zoom and it’s been released while we’re still sitting in our homes and talking to people via Zoom.” “There’s something very detached about the whole thing,” says director Rob Savage. It could also emerge as the defining film of any genre from 2020 (so far, it’s between Host or lockdown favourite Trolls World Tour). Host is the perfect horror film for the Covid era. To quote a harbinger of doom in The Blair Witch Project – Host’s spiritual predecessor – “Damn fool kids’ll never learn.” Indeed.īut the film industry – still scratching its head over how to proceed in the Covid pandemic – will likely take some lessons from this group of real-life friends, who have made and set a hit movie entirely in Zoom. Cue noises, objects flying around, and paranormal chaos. Seasoned horror fans will know that a movie séance is asking for trouble: six friends, a medium, and a startling lack of respect for the forces of the unknown (which they unwittingly invite onto their video chat, of course). Available on streaming service Shudder, Host has been a smash across social media since its debut in late July and has received rapturous praise from horror author Joe Hill, actor Elijah Wood, and countless critics.
The result is found footage chiller Host – written by Shepherd, Gemma Hurley and Rob Savage, and directed by Savage – the scariest and most on-the-pulse horror film of the year. But horror writer and producer Jed Shepherd came up with a two-word pitch to make this everyday reality truly terrifying: Zoom séance. Spending much of lockdown trapped within the confines of video conference calls has been nightmarish enough.
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