The meat of it unfolds within the familiar parameters of a 45-minute Zoom call, but there’s enough creepy atmospherics and nastiness crammed in to leave you drained when the call ends. Host wears its debt to found-footage horrors like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity on its sleeve, while briskly reworking the formula into a laptop-based horror with big jumps and relatable bits where the wifi craps out. She forgets to tell them that taking the piss during the seance could have very grim consequences. She turns out to be a medium who promises to connect them with spirits. The premise has a group of uni mates catching up on Zoom, laughing, in-joking, doing shots and grousing about being stuck inside quarantining as they wait for the star attraction to turn up.
Major props to director Rob Savage and his cobbled-together cast and crew for whipping up something this fresh and freaky while the rest of us were busy trying to keep up with Joe Wicks on YouTube. In honor of this film’s release, we’re looking at ten other in-screen horror films that’ll make you think twice before joining that Zoom call.Until someone makes a film about a haunted sourdough starter, this ingenious horror movie will remain the zeitgeistiest thing to emerge from lockdown. It’s a gorgeous hybrid of what it means to exist as a young person online. Schoenbrun juggles the ennui born of digital isolation with Zoom calls, YouTube videos, ASMR, and more. Recently, Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair hit streaming and it’s a gorgeous mix of narrative and in-screen horror.
Whether you call it in-screen horror, second screen horror, or screen life, it all boils down to one thing: digital terror. Human monsters have better access to us, and don’t even need to invade your house to inflict living hell. Ghosts and demons can’t be stopped by wires and the ethereal Cloud in fact, they can infect us in larger numbers at unfathomable speeds (see Pulse as one of the first films to tackle such an idea). It’s one that goes inside the computer as it were, with desktops and Zoom calls dominating the frame. As the digital age has consumed more and more of our daily lives, horror has, of course, taken to adapting that obsession into a new kind of found footage format.
It’s a series of tubes that have given us both unlimited access to information and access to some of the most heinous things the world has to offer.
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