In April 2020, British writer-director Rob Savage pranked his friends via Zoom with a terrifyingly clever live jump scare and captured their reactions on Twitter. Three months later, Savage released Host, an (almost) full length movie on the streaming platform Shudder, which expands his prank into one of 2020’s best examples of transmuting the spooky realities of technology, coronavirus, and that one dumb friend into timely, escapist entertainment.
Noting that Host is “almost” full length is not to designate it as a short, but to acknowledge how much story gets packed into a run time of under an hour. The movie uses every single minute to set up its characters, foreshadowing, and twists while still leaving time for screamingly violent horror goodness. Savage is no stranger to tight scripting, having drawn critical acclaim for his previous horror shorts Dawn of the Deaf (2016) and Salt (2017), but Host stands out as remarkable for getting a full film’s worth of plot within the external time constraint of a non-subscription Zoom call. Read more…
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