Host Review

2020 hasn’t exactly been a great year for horror – we had a couple of good ones earlier on in the year such as Color Out of Space, The Invisible Man, and The Lodge, but the heavy hitters we were all anticipating – Saint Maud, The Green Knight, Candyman, etc. - were all delayed, and the few that did come out – Relic, Antebellum, etc. - were mostly disappointing in some way. Outside of the lack of theater openings, I can easily see why horror hasn’t exactly been booming this year; for many people, our everyday lives have been so filled with anxieties and fears of the future that I’m not sure there’s much of a market for showing these fears up onto the screen.

A lot of the best horror of recent years (irritatingly dubbed “elevated horror”) came in the form of slow, atmospheric character dramas that used their horrific and supernatural elements to dive deep into aspects of society, politics and the human conditions to create some of the most disturbing, unsettling and haunting horror films in memory. Films like Hereditary, The Witch and Get Out forced us to look into a twisted mirror to find the ugliness that lies in our hearts and process our widespread cultural fears. That’s not what Host is here to do. In an environment where we are seeing all of these things reaching a violent real life peak, what Host is here to do is to simply give us some nice, stress-relieving spooks.

Host was film and released in 2020 by Rob Savage and distributed by the horror streaming platform Shudder. It is by far the shortest film I’ve reviewed so far this year, at only 56 minutes long including credits. Host follows a very simple plot about a group of friends separately quarantining and meeting each other over a Zoom call to perform an online séance. As one might guess, this séance goes horribly wrong.

It’s a pretty silly premise, but at its heart Host is a pretty silly movie. It’s a found footage film that marries the filmmaking tricks and demonic hauntings of 2009’s Paranormal Activity with the internet aesthetic and video chat room gimmicks of 2014’s Unfriended. As someone who enjoyed both of those films, I really enjoyed this one as well. It doesn’t really go as far in either direction as either of those movies do, but it’s a nice middle ground for any fans of those films looking for similar experiences. It’s mostly your typical jump scare movie, but the scares are well executed, and I for sure was spooked multiple times throughout my viewing.

If there’s any deeper horror to Host, it’s in the idea of being trapped in your own house with a potentially malevolent force, a feeling that is increasingly common in 2020 as a vicious pandemic sees us trapped in our own homes without any real physical social life. The characters are together over the internet, but they aren’t physically there for each other, and each of them is alone against whatever dark force they have summoned. While these horrors are very present, Host doesn’t dive too deep into them. It’s a genre of horror I like to call Funhouse Horror; not really trying to say much, just using clever, effective scares and interesting, well executed gimmicks to freak out audiences in ways that do more to relieve pent up stress than to make them think.

I have absolutely nothing against this sort of horror, and I have no qualms with saying I enjoyed Host quite a lot. There’s really not all that much to say about this one other than if you’re looking for a movie that’ll make you hang on the edge of your seat until you jump out of it, without making you think too much, this is the 2020 movie for you.