host (rob savage, 2020)

This is the ninth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 9 is called "Found Footage Week":

Popularized at the turn of the century with The Blair Witch Project, found footage is a genre/style with much older roots than you might expect. In literature we have a "found letters" or "found diary" form in the epistolary novel, which dates back to at least 1684 with Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, and horror novels have used the technique from Frankenstein to Dracula to Carrie. The first found footage movie was Shirley Clarke's The Connection from 1961, and Cannibal Holocaust brought the style to horror films in 1980. With low production costs, the potential profit margins are huge, as evidenced by the explosion that followed Blair Witch, most notably the Paranormal Activity franchise. The oft-maligned style spans all genres, from superhero sci-fi to comedy to more recent "screenlife" thrillers where the footage is on computer screens. What will we find this week? This is a fairly exhaustive list.

This week's challenge is to watch a previously unseen found footage film.

Whoa!

Host is an example of a movie where the less you know going in, the better, so stop reading if you haven't seen it. Hell, I'd never even heard of it, much less knew what it was about. I figured at best it would be OK-not-awful, like Smile, which was better than I expected. Well, Host was better than I expected. If The Babadook is the standard bearer for recent horror, Host is its equal, albeit in a different way.

Both films are more than simply scary. The Babadook is a crucial film about grief (and is scary as shit), Host is about the impact of social media (and is scary as shit). I'd say The Babadook has more depth, but Host has a lot to say without drawing attention to its arguments.

Host was made during the pandemic quarantine, and Rob Savage used the opportunity in a smart fashion. The entire movie takes place on Zoom ... all of the actors were in different places during filming, shooting their own footage with iPhones taped to their laptops, Savage himself directed from another location. The scenario is that a group of friends decide to have a seance via Zoom.

There is a reason this feature film is only 57 minutes long, and I'll avoid at least one spoiler by letting you figure out how the plot makes this necessary. Essentially, Host is just a scary movie, effective, a good scary movie, but even with the novel production, I don't know if I'd go further than that. Except Savage is really effective, and the setting invites post-mortem thinking about social media that is a little bit deeper than what you usually get after a good horror movie.

So consider this a big thumbs up. But if you are easily scared, avoid Host.