Host

The late, great show­man direc­tor William Cas­tle took incred­i­ble pains to add lit­tle, fourth wall-break­ing nov­el­ty extras to his films, as a way to enhance the screen­ing expe­ri­ence for thrill-hun­gry patrons. His 1959 film The Tin­gler, for instance, saw view­ers poten­tial­ly being plant­ed on a seat that had been fit­ted with an elec­tric buzzer for added expe­ri­en­tial shock.

Though there is no such live gim­mick in Rob Savage’s impres­sive hor­ror quick­ie Host, the spir­it of Cas­tle lives on in this film’s com­mit­ment to trad­ing on banal phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence and close-to-home frights, which is in this case enforced com­mu­ni­ca­tion via dig­i­tal video plat­forms. As a lit­tle bit of no-frills fun, six friends (five female, one male) decide to give their week­ly Zoom catch-up call over to a mum­sy medi­um named Sey­lan who leads them in what she claims to be a friend­ly, can­dle-lit jaunt over to the astral plane in search of the dear­ly departed.

The film is pre­sent­ed in desk­top vision, and we have the unique van­tage of being able to see the faces of all the actors, head-on, through­out most of the run­time. It’s not long before a vis­i­tor from the spir­it world takes offence to a glib ruse by one of the par­tic­i­pants, and thus a ram­page of shad­owy ter­ror begins.

While char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions are a lit­tle thin, and the plot machi­na­tions cleave too tight­ly the con­ven­tions of the genre, Host is remark­able in its quick­fire inge­nu­ity and the fact that it per­fect­ly traps a strange, bemus­ing era in amber with an impres­sive mix­ture of fond­ness and dis­dain. In the lat­ter stages, when per­son­al well­be­ing has been placed in seri­ous jeop­ardy, one of the Zoomers takes it upon her­self to break quar­an­tine restric­tions and run to her friend’s house, and despite the fact that a killer spec­tre is on the loose, they still take a short moment to bump elbows.

There are some real­ly smart set-pieces which employ the quirks of the tech­nol­o­gy that many will now be used to, such as the arti­fi­cial back­ground func­tion, the time-out warn­ings, and also the dark, pix­e­lat­ed plains in the back­drop of each image. Sav­age often falls back on hav­ing the pro­tag­o­nists film their exploits when they’re forced to fol­low an eerie noise ema­nat­ing from with­in their domes­tic space, and these small laps­es in which char­ac­ters use the tech­nol­o­gy in unbe­liev­able ways (ie to serve an audi­ence rather than them­selves) dimin­ish­es the impact of the story.

At bare­ly an hour long, though, it more than jus­ti­fies its exis­tence, and will no-doubt become a call­ing card work for Sav­age and co-writer Gem­ma Hurley.