A movie like Rob Savage’s Host—a horror movie shot on Zoom at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—could’ve easily been pure gimmick. But while it does relish its gimmick, poking into nearly every feature of 2020 Zoom in the process, it’s not content to rely on it. It’s also too good, even in its narrowly focused way, to survive only as a time capsule.
What a time capsule it is, though. Pop culture hasn’t entirely known what to do with the pandemic, and while it’s fair enough for any given work to exclude or skip over it, it does mean that there’s a hole in our entertainment where a long, weird, and still resonating part of our lives should be. Host gets it right, both in terms of social observation—the couple who decided to share their lockdown far too early in their relationship—and, to double back for a minute, in its precise use of its gimmick. This was made at a time when the average person was still getting the hang of Zoom, and that makes its sheer Zoominess feel like a valuable part of its era-specific setting. Someone joins on both her laptop and her phone, creating a hellish echoing distortion. Another character is enchanted with her looping video background. Filters. Time limits on unpaid accounts.
In 2020, I watched all this with a sense of weirdly gleeful recognition. “Representation” often gets talked about in terms of depicting certain demographic kinds of lived human experience, but I feel some of the same frisson seeing anything personally recognizable but rare up on screen or on the page. Fictional versions of online life often don’t ping me that way, but this—like its cousin Unfriended—gets a lot of the details right.
But what’s most important, and why this movie is still worth watching, is that it uses all those details not only to get a chuckle and a nod but to raise active goosebumps. Host isn’t interested in the usual pesky details of cinema—like most computer screen/found footage films, it essentially needs to look like shit in order to be convincing—or even art—let’s just say the characterization is, uh, sparing. On a more blissful note, it also doesn’t care about lore, the bane of horror movies everywhere. You can describe the supernatural problem here—someone lies about a ghost during a séance, and that lie creates a “mask” a demon can use to enter their lives—in a sentence. The demon doesn’t have a name. It doesn’t have a spooky book. It doesn’t need any of that; it has under 60 minutes to lay waste, so it doesn’t have time to fuck around.
What it cares about is what the movie cares about, and that’s horror. A horror movie concentrating solely on scaring you as often and as badly as it can has become a rare beast, and while I’m fine with that not being the only kind of horror movie, it’s lovely to see it hasn’t gone extinct. Once things get going, Host attempts to throw scares at you almost the way a ZAZ movie throws jokes. Don’t like that jump scare? Just a second, we’ll give you some rising tension. How about some violence? How about when you can’t see the violence? The shutter-flashes between those last two in one key sequence is maybe my favorite part of the movie, making something intensely alarming out of both the messy cruelty and the trite concealment.
I’m under no illusion that this will work for everyone. You have to have a certain affection for the movie’s willingness to throw everything at the wall—music box! Polaroid camera! Zoom time limit!—to see what sticks. But I got scared enough, and bought in thoroughly enough, that even on rewatch, the cute little credits format briefly made me panic at the thought that the demon was going to Zoom call the film’s stunt coordinator. Take this as an indictment of my mental well-being, if you like. But for an hour-long film made under these conditions to evoke that kind of thought-stopping fear is not nothing. It may be shallow, but no one ever said a reflecting pool didn’t have its own beauty.
Host is streaming on Netflix.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Just imagine "Funeral March of a Marionette" playing for this wrap-up post of a somewhat uneven season.
Anthologized
"You don't get murdered without a reason."
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Elementary, “The Long Fuse” – A pipe bomb goes off at web design firm, but Holmes realizes before long that the bomb was left in the ductwork years ago, and was only set off by accident. So he turns the clock back to see who would have targeted the former tenants, a PR consultancy. Lisa Edelstein is the big name guest, and we meet the show’s worst flaw: the big name guest is usually the killer. That was fine on Columbo, but not on a more traditional mystery. Meanwhile, Watson pushes Holmes to find a support group sponsor since at this point she plans to end her work with him soon, and Holmes picks Alfredo (played by Ato Essandoh), an Black ex-con whose “street” fashion sense belies hidden depths. I am not entirely sure what to make of the attempts to turn stereotype on its ear, but Alfredo will be a semi-regular and a welcome addition to the cast.
MLB on TBS, Cubs vs Phils – Solidly entertaining game, good production values, but when the game is streamed instead of watched on cable, the same three or four ads repeats ad nauseam. Especially annoying were the two ads for prescription drugs, one of which is for a drug you take to fight the side effects of another drug! Thankfully, I have a mute button.
This is often a problem on network mystery dramas. Make it the person we least suspect, please! (I am still stunned by how good the twist in And Then There Were None is.)
While the mysteries on Monk were never very good, in general the biggest name guests tended to be used a lot more diversely.
Copycat – fancied some easy-watchin’ 90s-thrillin’ Holly Huntin’ goodness and this delivered, the direction feels very “we have Brian De Palma at home” but I’ll take the cribbing of another style over no style at all (looking at you, films from now!) and the early-internet stuff is just insanely charming in how little sense it makes with 2026 eyes. The hook of the killer recreating famous kills is also a pretty good one, and it gives an interesting wrinkle to the Silence of the Lambs-esque “here’s the detective and here’s the unconventional person they have recruited as backup” angle, with Sigourney Weaver’s PTSD housebound serial killer psychologist able to crack the clues but not, you know, go outdoors. The supporting cast of Familiar Guys is also consistently a little better than you might expect, not to the point that I’m going to hail this as a forgotten classic or anything but it delivers all the well-made-thriller stuff it should while also packing a few surprises. But not even a single cat, let alone the multiple cats that the title would imply.
No cats despite the title?! Zero stars! Sigourney Weaver is eminently watchable though, may have to give this a whirl.
So eminently watchable that she attracts the attention of TWO serial killers! And the first one is Harry Connick Jr!
This was a movie I thought showed the basic positive quality of Hollywood filmmaking. I also don’t think it’s any kind of lost classic, but it has one really great element – Weaver’s portrayal of someone with agoraphobia – and builds a movie that’s at least mediocre around it. In a better movie, I’d say “this would be worth it just for Weaver’s performance”.
They also picked/ built an absolutely incredible house for her to be stuck in, so her scenes never feel any less cinematic for the single location.
But mostly all the chatroom / online chess / virus stuff is just absolute (copy)catnip to me, any film with this kind of “we don’t yet understand the internet, let’s devote 10% of the film to it” approach gets at least an extra half-star from me.
The problem with copying real cats is the coats will never be the same. You can’t clone a tortoiseshell and have it come out the same way every time!
It’s a glitch in the Matrix.
It’s so funny looking at critics from 1980-2010 complaining about “style over substance,” because I’d take that in a heartbeat over neither, and a hell of a lot of movies now have neither.
It’s something I find easy enough to ignore most of the time but I did watch this particular movie on Netflix so had to scroll past a ton of their generic bullshit to find something fun.
Justified, Season Five, Episode Six, “Kill The Messenger”
“Well look at that. I think we may have come up with a peaceful resolution.”
“He said it would go as smooth as the last time we did business together.”
“That’s good, right?”
“Last time we did business together, I robbed him.”
Things are escalating here. Honestly, I like this season as much as any of the others, I don’t see what the problem is. Ava’s story is the most interesting, continuing to push her in the direction of Crime Lord as she is forced to look tough to survive (which is to say, be able to live with herself). So much of the crime life here seems like looking as tough as possible until your inevitable death; chasing the illusion of immortality. Dramatically, I feel like a bullet should have come for Boyd already.
You know, I always feel bad for Dewey. He should be mining coal – metaphorically, if not literally, as someone doing grunt work for a larger cause. He’s the kind of guy you want anti-capitalist policies to protect; he’d never do great in any industry, never exactly rise to manager, god help us, but he’d get by and do useful work and feel okay about it instead of hating feeling stupid all the time.
Biggest Laugh: “No, he’s loyal.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “What, you slip in Art’s shower? Cuz that’s how he hurt his hand.”
Top Ownage: Art punching Raylan, obviously, but this is a good one for ownage – Boyd killing Swift owns hard, and Ava getting jumped is awful but is intoxicating in its ownage.
Slow Horses, “Negotiating with Tigers” and “Uninvited Guests”
Lots of great stuff here, including Lamb expressing both explicit approval of an absent Catherine, whose “flinch” in her ransom photo turns out to be her way of gesturing towards a vital clue to her location (one of several great spy moments that are done in front of us and only contextualized later on), and implicit approval of a present River, since–although Lamb won’t pass up an opportunity to mock him and kick him out of his cab–Lamb has to admit that if he had one hour to comply with exorbitant demands to save Catherine’s life, he’d have done it too. (Which is probably part of why he twists Taverner’s arm to demand River’s immediate return from the Park’s basement.)
Shirley’s coke habit temporarily gets her and Marcus fired, although I strongly feel they could Costanza their way out of this. Tearney authorizes a multi-person hit, including on River and Louisa. (I feel like one of the defining qualities that makes someone land in Slough House is “annoying/thwarting their superiors,” because Duffy gets conned and shown up by River, leading to the infiltration of the Park, but he’s still willing to commit cold-blooded murder on Tearney’s say-so, so his career is safe.) Spider dies of a terminal case of being a little shit. River gets the shit kicked out of him, gives a cocky thumbs up and an awkward hug, and gets trapped in a revolving door. Lamb weaponizes a fart (“I hope that doesn’t get into the groundwater”). Judd continues to be my favorite recurring antagonist: awful but incredibly funny. There’s a lot of nice tenderness in the scene with River’s grandfather’s failing memory, with River trying to soothe him that it’s understandable and that he still has it even though both of them know he’s slipping away. Ditto, in a more awkward way, Louisa (and even Lamb, to some extent) trying to convince River–who’s genuinely shaken by Spider’s death even though Spider viciously manipulated him and crowed about it only hours ago–that he’s mourning one of the shittiest one-time friends in existence.
This is maybe my favorite season so far: Catherine’s abduction is a great emotional hook, and one that gives her plenty of opportunities to demonstrate her chops (watching her make deductions about the house and her kidnappers’ familiarity with it is a real pleasure), and almost everyone’s been a great combination of alternately entertainingly competent and comically hapless, so the plot moves well and has a great funny energy at the same time. There’s not quite enough Taverner, but adding more Tearney helps make up for that.
Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins had the last two episodes out and without spoiling anything, they did a good job with using the least obviously needed member of the ensemble as part of the plot. (And making us care a bit more about Rusty and Reggie’s friendship.) Great jokes: Trying to challenge Kendrick Lamar to a rap battle which leads to a pretty funny Kendrick impression/a complete reversal. A dig at Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood getting mixed up a lot and both being short fantasy epic icons/nerds. “I can’t stay here anymore – I’ll go pack my food.” “Since PBS is gone, Ken Burns is just doing quincinera videos now.” Jerry Basmati’s masculinity retreat being a place where men build wafflemakers and phone cases…for Jerry Basmati’s QVC line. The Hooters ripoff Rusty used to do ads for is called Boobers. Bunch of other funny lines I can’t remember now.
This is such a fun, scary film and I love that they left it at a slightly awkward running time because it just fit what they wanted to do. I guess outside of pandemic times they might have felt obliged to pad it out to 80+ minutes and it would surely have suffered as a result?
Yeah, it really benefits from that runtime, and I think you’re right that they only got away with it because pandemic movies were such a welcome novelty that everyone would accept a <60 min. film. Seeing the time warning pop up near the end adds such a great extra "oh shit" factor.
Year of the Month update!
This May, we’ll be opening the doors for your writing on any movies, albums, books, etc. from 2014!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Earth to Echo
TBD: Cori Domschot: Jack Ryan
May 23rd: Ben Hohenstatt: Plowing Into the Field of Love
And there’s still time to write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1949.
TBD: Cori Domschot: On the Town
Apr. 24th: Cori Domschot: I Was a Male War Bride
Apr. 23rd: Bridgett Taylor: Confessions of a Mask
Apr. 27th: Tristan J. Nankervis: 1984