The subtext of living isolated and fearful in a new normal that could come crashing down at any moment and kill you is clear. Host is part of the British ghost movie tradition that joins the last pseudo-documentary ghost thriller Ghostwatch, which was broadcast only once on British television and freaked out the entire nation because some people thought it was real. They also have a long-running fascination with seances and summoning spirits since Victorian times. James and short stories, Henry James' The Turning of the Screw and the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas, the British, while claiming to be nonbelievers in the supernatural, have always enjoyed the spooky, creepy fear of the unknown, of something sinister and malevolent lurking in wait in the dark, intent on harming you.
Savage kept the shocks and scares from his actors so their reactions would be as real and authentic as possible.īritish culture has always had an affinity for ghost stories. It's the slasher film dynamic where the characters need to do something staggeringly dumb in order for the horror to happen to them.Ĭast members Caroline Ward, Emma Louise Webb, Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Edward Linard, and Radina Drandova all act and talk like real people – no clichéd dialogue you get from horror scripts because they were improvising their lines and reactions without a script.
The characters also follow typical horror movie tropes of people going to investigate spaces and rooms they definitely should stay the hell away from. You do wonder why the hell someone is being so awkward as to take their whole laptop with them into another room, but the contrivance is actually explained – they want their friends on the zoom feed to see what they're seeing because they don't want to be alone. Writer-director Rob Savage cleverly uses the unsteady point of view of a computer or phone camera to play up the lurking suspense of navigating a dark corridor, waiting for something to jump out at you. Things slowly go awry, and by the time the friends realise they're in deep trouble, it's already too late for all of them. The result is a fun if predictable horror movie that only runs for 55 minutes.
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