One can relate to the fury the poltergeist unleashes, thrashing apartment objects about. Shot and edited entirely on laptop and phone screens, the cyber horror plays out the entirety of a video call conference on the app Zoom. As we sit at home with the devices that promised us limitless possibilities in our hands, “Host” identifies the uncomfortable in-between state we exist in, operating ghostlike. But while the unhappy ghost wreaks havoc, the yearning for collective activity simmers beneath the film’s lo-fi aesthetic.Ĭhanneling the spirits of the dead, on the internet no less, becomes a useful analogy for mourning the recent past. Savage makes common Zoom call interruptions, like strange noises and glitchy video, play double duty as both red herrings and supernatural disturbances. As Haley (Haley Bishop) gathers a group of friends to speak with a medium (Seylan Baxter), the unleashing of an angry demon seems to speak to a collective id. Streaming on Shudder, the film makes easy observations about how the pandemic has changed the most mundane activities, but perhaps contains even greater insight. Rob Savage, the director and co-writer of “Host,” finds a surprising amount of ingenuity in mining the horror of yet another quarantine conference call. Host is a film directed by Rob Savage with Haley Bishop, Radina Drandova, Edward Linard, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward. Six friends get together during lockdown for their weekly zoom call. In one mutation, the Zoom horror movie, found-footage expanded its palette to chats and anything else that can appear on a video screen: YouTube clips, social. If the future of filmmaking is remote and socially distanced, a Zoom séance isn’t such a bad place to start.

The host zoom movie