If it were any longer, it wouldn’t be as good, because the premise is solid, but it’s thin.

And it’s extremely efficient, wrapping things up in just under an hour. Savage uses Zoom’s built-in features that we’ve all become familiar with (customizable backgrounds, face filters, that pesky time limit on the free version) for clever purposes. The effects and stunts are very cool and surprising, and the scares are much more effective than you might expect. Savage directed the actors remotely, and the actors operated their own cameras, did their own lighting, and helped set up their own practical effects. The really impressive parts of Host are the technical ones. The innovation is that when someone accidentally summons a malevolent spirit over Zoom, it materializes in the houses of everyone on the call, not just in a single location.ġ0 Straight-to-Streaming Blockbusters to Watch While Theaters Are Closed It’s all very standard horror movie character setup, and the story is very traditional. Radina (Radina Drandova) is in a fight with her boyfriend, nobody likes Teddy’s (Edward Linard) girlfriend, Haley and Jemma (Jemma Moore) don’t really get along. But they just want to hang out, because they all have their own things going on at home.

The seance was organized by Haley (Haley Bishop), who wants her friends to take it more seriously than they are. It’s about a group of friends who gather over Zoom while under quarantine at their respective homes to have a seance, led by a medium named Seylan (Seylan Baxter the characters’ names are the actors’, adding to the movie’s Paranormal Activity-influenced authenticity). The film was directed by rising British filmmaker Rob Savage, who wrote the script with Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd Savage and Shepherd also executive-produced.

It’s not the first Zoom-made thing, but it’s one of the best, and is of the COVID-19 moment to a remarkable degree. Host, which premiered Thursday, July 30, was shot and produced remotely while under quarantine, and it takes place entirely on Zoom, the video chat app that’s become the essential mode of communication for work and keeping in touch with groups of friends. Horror movies reflect the fears of the cultural moment in which they’re made, but it’s not usually as direct as it is with Host, a new movie that’s available to stream on horror-focused streaming service Shudder.

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