The Seance That Launched a Thousand Heart Attacks
If you ever sat on a Zoom call in 2020 and thought, “This meeting would be better if everyone just died,” Host is here to lovingly grant that wish. Rob Savage’s 56-minute scream of a movie is a lockdown horror distilled to its purest form: six friends, one séance, zero respect for the spirit world, and a demon that is very much done with your social distancing. Shot entirely via Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic—with the actors doing their own lighting, makeup, and mini-stunts—Host turns the least cinematic interface possible into a tight, nasty, surprisingly clever horror experience.
Found Footage Meets “Can You Hear Me Now?”
The genius of Host is that it doesn’t fight the format—it weaponizes it. Instead of pretending Zoom is something else, Savage leans into every quirk: glitching audio, frozen frames, lag, people talking over each other, awkward silences when someone’s Wi-Fi dies right as things get terrible. This isn’t just “shot on a computer”; it’s a film that understands how our screens already make us uneasy, then adds a malevolent entity to the call like a coworker that should have been left off the invite.
The entire movie feels like you accidentally clicked the wrong link and joined the world’s worst team-building exercise. The camera angles are all slightly crappy in the exact way that screams “real person, bad laptop,” which gives the scares that extra little sting of plausibility. You’ve been on this call. You’ve just never been yanked backwards out of your chair by a demon on it… yet.
Haley, Jemma, and the Demon of Bad Decisions
Our doomed lineup—Haley, Jemma, Radina, Emma, Caroline, and Teddy—are friends trying to make lockdown bearable with weekly Zoom hangs. This time, Haley ups the stakes by hiring Seylan, a medium, to guide them through a virtual séance. It’s already a terrible idea, but it becomes legendary when Jemma, bored, invents a tragic dead friend and fakes being choked by his spirit.
Seylan’s connection drops—because of course your psychic cuts out at the worst time—and in that gap, the prank opens the door to something very real and very unfriendly. Seylan later explains that Jemma has basically made a catfish profile for the afterlife: by inventing a spirit, she gave a demon a mask and a name to wear—a tulpa gone wrong. It’s one of the film’s smartest touches: the horror is literally born from boredom and disrespect, the two great energies of quarantine.
Jump Scares with Surgical Precision
Host has been called one of the scariest films ever made based on measured audience heart rates, and for once the marketing hype isn’t totally laughable. Savage and editor Brenna Rangott understand that in a desktop-horror environment, you can’t just throw gore at the screen; you have to choreograph dread into pixel-sized corners.
We get:
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A chair yanked violently backwards with no visible culprit.
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The legs of a hanging body, just barely visible at the top of the frame in Caroline’s attic.
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A Polaroid flash that reveals a figure dangling in Haley’s hallway for a single, stomach-dropping frame.
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Zoom backgrounds looping cheerful footage while the real person is… having a much worse time.
The scares are fast, mean, and efficient. There’s almost no downtime, and yet the movie doesn’t feel rushed; it feels like someone took a 90-minute haunting and removed all the scenes where people wander around calling each other’s names.
Social Anxiety, Now with Added Demon
For a movie with a demon in it, Host is also painfully good at capturing 2020’s psychological grime. The characters’ small talk about lockdown, their obvious loneliness, the way they deflect fear with jokes—it all feels like a time capsule of that specific mid-pandemic malaise. Critics have praised how the film taps into social anxiety and separation, turning familiar interface fatigue into existential dread.
The darkly funny part? The Zoom UI becomes a kind of prison. They can see each other suffer but can’t help. Turning your camera off is a form of denial; leaving the call is an act of cowardice that the movie punishes brutally. And the most cutting gag of all: the “Your meeting will end in 10 minutes unless you upgrade” warning pops up in the middle of their supernatural meltdown. Forget the demon—capitalism is still here, asking for your card details while you die.
DIY Filmmaking with Real Risk
Behind the scenes, Host is as scrappy as it gets. Savage directed remotely, sending fishing line and effect kits to the actors so they could make cupboards fly open, doors slam, and bodies jerk out of frame. They did their own stunts, rigged their own pulls, and essentially turned their homes into micro soundstages. It’s old-school practical effects smuggled into a modern setting—less glossy CGI, more “I really might fall on my face doing this.”
The cast worked from a detailed treatment rather than a locked script, improvising dialogue and reacting in the moment while Savage sent live notes via private Zoom messages. That improvisational feel sells the friendships; they talk over each other, tease, and react the way actual friends would if someone said, “Hey, let’s invite the dead to our call, what could go wrong?”
Ensemble Chemistry in Six Tiny Boxes
Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Radina Drandova, Emma Louise Webb, Caroline Ward, and Edward Linard (Teddy) have the kind of easy chemistry that most big-budget ensemble pieces would kill for. They each get their moment to be scared, funny, or tragically doomed, and the film smartly differentiates them through how they handle the crisis:
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Haley is the true believer, trying to hold the ritual together.
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Jemma hides fear under sarcasm and pays for it.
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Caroline, queen of Zoom backgrounds, becomes the film’s most brutal visual gag.
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Emma is the panic machine, complete with filters and flour for ghost-hunting.
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Radina gets one of the darkest blink-and-you-miss-it reveals with her boyfriend’s hanging body.
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Teddy, rejoining late, walks into an absolute nightmare like he’s logging back in after a router reset.
There’s dark humor in how mundanely human they remain while everything falls apart—you’ve got people apologizing mid-scream, arguing about who caused what, and still trying to follow séance instructions like this is a group project worth a grade.
A Lean Runtime, No Filler, All Killer
At just under an hour, Host understands something studios forgot years ago: horror doesn’t need bloat. The film gives you setup, séance, escalation, and full-bore chaos, then slams the laptop shut. No prequel monologue about the demon’s backstory, no coda six months later. Just carnage, jump scares, and the quiet, awful recognition that your next real-life Zoom call might feel just a little cursed.
That brevity also keeps the pandemic trappings from feeling like a gimmick. Rather than milking COVID for misery points, the film uses lockdown as a framework: people are isolated, bored, looking for connection, and willing to try dumb stuff. The demon is almost incidental; the real original sin is refusing to take anything seriously until it’s too late.
The First Great “Quarantine Horror”
Critics have hailed Host as a defining “quarantine horror” film, and that’s not just because it was made under restrictions; it feels like 2020 in a way that’s uncomfortably accurate. It captures that weird mix of cabin fever, gallows humor, and omnipresent dread, then throws in a demon as the world’s least helpful seventh participant.
As a horror fan, it’s hard not to be a little delighted by how much mayhem Savage squeezes out of such a simple premise. As someone who survived a dozen soul-destroying conference calls that year, it’s even harder not to appreciate the catharsis of watching Zoom itself become an instrument of doom.
Host is tight, mean, inventive, and darkly funny in how ruthlessly it exploits the tools we used to cling to normalcy. It’s proof that you can make one of the year’s best horror films with a laptop, some fishing wire, and the universal, eternal truth that if you mock the dead on camera, they will absolutely unmute themselves.
