REVIEW: Robert Savage’s Host is Fast, Cheap, & Effective, But at What Cost?

A cautionary look at the fractured, de-professionalized future of film

by Tim Redacted

2020s Host (directed by Robert Savage, written by Savage, Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd), which was shot entirely on the video-conference service Zoom and distributed by Shudder, holds the unusual distinction of being the first movie filmed and released during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Based on an internet prank organized by Savage and running a tight 57 minutes, Host is a fraternal twin to the 2007 found-footage standard Paranormal Activity or at least 70% of it.

The film’s format, and the conditions under which it was made, eliminate the possibility for including any B-characters or exposition. Haley (Haley Bishop) convinces her friends to join her in an online seance led by guide Seylan (Seylan Baxter), who lays down some ground rules. Haley’s friend Jemma (Jemma Moore) makes clear that she doesn’t take the supernatural seriously, goofs on Seylan, angers the otherworldly, and hilarity ultimately does not ensue.

Present along with a generous helping of demonic terror are a spate of new annoyances that will be familiar to anyone who has tried their hand at online socializing. Teddy (Edward Linard) misses out on the action thanks to his needy girlfriend, Jinny (Jinny Lofthouse). Seylan’s call drops thanks to crappy internet, forcing Haley to relay her instructions to the group in a deadly game of telephone. Caroline (Caroline Ward) repeatedly tricks the group with animated backgrounds… and so on.

If horror is an illustration of the moment’s common anxieties, Host boils our moment down to a “Relatable content!” meme featuring unfortunate quarantine living arrangements and the limitations of technology, isolation, loneliness, and boredom.

If horror is an illustration of the moment’s common anxieties, Host boils our moment down to a “Relatable content!” meme.

No bad press

Host also sneaks in a fair bit of product placement for Zoom itself. The movie opens and closes on a Zoom logo. The characters, like Caroline and her background, showcase the teleconferencing platform’s various features.

The trick here is that movies, unlike commercials, can be critical of or even cast aspersions on  the things they’re selling. In a very straightforward sense, product placement might be a scene in The Crow (1994) where Brandon Lee takes pauses to cooly take a regenerative drag off a cigarette and quips, “You shouldn’t smoke these. They’ll kill ‘ya.” More sinister and metaphorical is a film like The Hurt Locker (2008), which in some sense might be considered a sort of product placement for the global war on terror: while the Oscar-winner is tacitly critical of America’s overseas excursions, American soldiers are portrayed as universally likeable, tortured, complex and ruggedly handsome, and there are no bothersome Iraqi perspectives muddying those waters. Host can be similarly be summarized as “attractive women brutally murdered on camera,” but none of that is Zoom’s fault. The medium itself—and the company behind it—remains happily uninterrogated.

This is one of Host’s many shortcomings. Found-footage horror hasn’t broken much new ground since 2007m with onlynly Unfriended (2014) levying any real criticism (in its case of private video software like Snapchat). The phenomenon of Zoom-bombing, where an interlocutor joins a meeting to which they were not invited, seems like a bug at first glance; but Zoom is primarily a work tool, and the ability to pop in unbidden can be a critical feature for bosses or HR. Just as spirits were not meant to exist in the human world and only cause havoc, so was Zoom never intended for social use.

Host’s monster, credited as The Spirit (James Swanton), operates on an entirely different set of physics as the characters: it can be anywhere, overpower anyone, and kill without hesitation. That much of the world’s relationship to the internet is the same—Zoom is particularly insecure and secretive about what it does with its vast cache of facial and user data—is incidental. The film has no real interest in asking questions of its characters’ relationship with the internet itself; it never ponders that, under quarantine, the whole of a person’s social life, and in this case their deaths, are recorded by for-profit entities.

Each actor is also a producer, an assistant, a makeup specialist, a script supervisor, and various other tasks unto themselves, until those jobs are rendered vestigial.

Coming attractions

Host’s final shortcomings are its predictable downer ending and, in spite of its unique format and circumstances, a complete lack of anything to say. Savage and co-writers aren’t interested in exploring the times we live in, just in wrapping up the plot more or less how you would expect. In a final bid to save Haley, Jemma breaks quarantine, bolting down a desolate street, her face streaking by the camera clad in a now-ubiquitous medical mask, only for the pair to ultimately get got.

Sorely-missed physical closeness has no bearing or effect on anything. Roll credits—and by credits, the movie means a short scroll through another Zoom feature.

There are better uses for extraordinary times: in 80s-set Under the Shadow (2016) its protagonist tries to abscond with her daughter from a haunted Tehran apartment, only to be arrested for appearing in public with heads uncovered. The audience is left hanging between two terrors: the monster and the legacy of Iran’s 1979 revolution.

Even Host’s murderous demon, under scrutiny, doesn’t live up to a coronavirus metaphor. COVID-19 is far more devious, killing the unseen in racial minority neighborhoods and nursing homes (Host is British, but the island’s cities have similar ethnographic dynamics to the U.S.). If The Spirit behaved more like its real-life viral counterpart, Haley and Gemma and friends would likely be the survivors of its mayhem, equipped for battle with work-from-home setups and healthcare like many middle-class white twenty-somethings are.

Still, Host deserves credit for innovation, and as a harbinger of a faster, leaner, more “agile” form of filmmaking. The actors never left their houses, and interactions between them and The Spirit were added post-production. From conception to delivery, Host took just 12 weeks. Its a very different film, and its success signals that a new, cheap method of production is available, and the bootstraps-friendly story of an internet-prankster-turned-horror-maestro is a great sell from major studios to aspiring filmmakers.

But innovation is neither unbiased, nor an unambiguous good. 

To paraphrase the podcast TRASHFUTURE, the role of modern tech is to “profit from existing services while skirting their regulation, undermine labor, and individualize everything.” Rideshare companies are the perfect distillation of this: there’s no central authority beyond the shareholders, no labor union, workers use their own vehicle, they buy their own fuel and do their own maintenance, and a sleekly designed app empowers the end user with cheaper rides than traditional taxis.

Is it innovative? Sure. Has anyone built even a working-class life driving for Uber? The service itself is sold to potential workers as something to do between other jobs, so, no.

And so like Uber, Host is an innovation—but not a better taxi. Like its characters, it has unwittingly breached the ether and plucked out a new hustle-and-grind mode of filmmaking, where each actor is also a producer, an assistant, a makeup specialist, a script supervisor, and various other tasks unto themselves, until those jobs are rendered vestigial.

The creative arts are already a gauntlet of self-employment and unpaid internships, usually for a pittance from distributors, and that spirit, starved of moviegoers cash, is hungry and ready to eat.

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