Why Host Is Being Called The Best Horror Movie Of 2020

Why Host Is Being Called The Best Horror Movie Of 2020

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We look at how Shudder’s 56-minute Zoom horror, Host (directed by Rob Savage), is smashing expectations to being called one of the best of 2020.

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Why Host Is Being Called The Best Horror Movie Of 2020

Shudder’s latest horror movie original, the 56-minute Host, which takes place entirely on Zoom is currently taking the plaudits for its originality, ingenuity and craft. For some, the achievements of director Rob Savage (Dawn Of The Deaf) and his small cast are enough to herald it the best horror movie of 2020. So why the heady praise? Is it a worthy contender?

Fundamentally a found footage horror, filmed and set entirely on video chat platform Zoom, Host recounts the tale of a seance gone wrong and the immediate fallout as something unintended is invited into the chat. In the wake of its release on Shudder, it raced to 100% on RottenTomatoes and tides of effusive reactions across social media.

Since its release, Host has drawn praise from prominent figures like NOS4A2 writer (and son of Stephen King) Joe Hill, Elijah Wood, Kotaku founder Brian Cecente, WWE star Baron Corbin and, perhaps most importantly, horror movie fans and critics. Such is its immediate impact – aided and abetted by the very precisely relevant gimmick of its filming style and story – that is has already transcended to the hallowed turf of meme-ability. But why it has isn’t simply a matter of the movie being perfectly of and within the moment of its creation. Host is more than just a pandemic fad flick.

Host Blends Traditional Horror With The Painfully Modern Now

Why Host Is Being Called The Best Horror Movie Of 2020

Host is not the first film to be set entirely on the computer screen of one of its characters and it inevitably inspires comparisons with Unfriended and Searching. But in tying the story and the filmmaking process to Zoom (and referencing the COVID-19 pandemic in dialogue), it’s even more rooted in the context of its creation.

That may look like a limitation – because countless films have dated themselves quickly in their eagerness to embrace tech trends – but director Rob Savage has recognized the need for balance. Like The Blair Witch Project before it, Host is a marriage of the traditional and, not just the modern, but the immediate. And, crucially, it’s a horror that knows precisely where it owes its dues. To call it simply Quarantine 2020 Horror is too reductive – instead it seeks to appeal to real horror fans.

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Look beneath the surface and all of the heavy lifting is done by things familiar to horror fans. Darkness, negative space, horror character archetypes and even more specific details like a creaky attic, a child’s music box and a clown puppet. It’s not quite The Cabin In The Woods, but the visual cues, the atmospherics and the affectionate nods, Easter Eggs and hidden horror movie references are clearly from a filmmaking team deeply invested in the genre.

By the admissions of director Rob Savage and writer and Executive Producer Jed Shepherd, Host is influenced by the likes of Lake Mungo, UFO Abduction (1989) and infamous BBC horror project Ghostwatch, among others. And the research, lovingly built over years by horror movie fans is what makes this more than a modern gimmick film, even if the pandemic does make it scarier.

Host Never Limits Its Zoom Platform To A Gimmick

Why Host Is Being Called The Best Horror Movie Of 2020

Horror movies have a long tradition of using negative space and voids to scare the audience. That essential fear of the unknown is why horrors like Host use darkness, voids, visual impairment, limited fields of vision and loaded absence so liberally. Host uses Zoom not just as a movie gimmick but as a means to weaponize every one of those tropes against its audience.

Host’s story obviously requires darkness – and uses it brilliantly in the finale – because of the central seance (and the audience would challenge the logic of one done in stark light), but Rob Savage also uses the limits and defining characteristics of Zoom to prick up the same old fears. At times, there’s a drop in signal quality, which robs the viewer of the certainty of vision – the same way The Blair Witch Project created tension through frantic, grainy filming – and one haunting sequence uses Zoom’s fake background option to brilliantly scary effect.

Not only that, but the platform also encourages the director to gleefully play around with the background. Because all of the characters are enthralled with one another and all staring at a screen, they ignore what’s happening behind them, which opens up everything else the audience can see on their screen as a canvas for scares and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that matter later.

And as soon as one thing happens in the background, or within any of the characters’ homes, the audience then spend the rest of the time trying not to be surprised by something else looming out of the darkness. It’s an incredibly efficient way to build terror.

There are also key scenes that lean heavily on the idea of absence, which is amplified by the use of Zoom. As soon as a character disappears from their screen, the audience is primed to expect something to happen. Something wicked to this way come. Thanks to how short the film’s runtime is, those surprises tend to come thick and fast and the atmospheric builds always get a pay-off. Host, in that respect, is one of the most satisfying movies, even when it’s terrifying.

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When, towards the end, only one character remains on-screen, and all that’s visible of her is one terrified eye peering from under covers (an image so immediately iconic it’s been used as Host’s poster image), Savage presents multiple empty squares and the opportunity for a scare from any one of them. It’s the same sensation that the finale, which ingeniously uses Zoom’s countdown feature to really raise audience pulses, targets as the Zoomers try desperately to penetrate darkness using only the flash of a polaroid camera.

Why Host Is So Terrifying (But Also So Entertaining)

Host works so well because of familiarly. It’s not only a familiarity in its approach to horror, but because Rob Savage and his creative team have dialed into something the audience has been forced to do during the pandemic lockdown. Everyone recognizes video calling now, most will be familiar with the idea of the limits, the frustrations, and the quirks of behavior (like filters and participants muting) and all of those newly habitual behaviors are used here against the audience.

And that’s the rub of it. Host isn’t just an impressively crafted horror – and given the limits of how it was filmed, that’s not to be underestimated – it’s a film experience that perversely welcomes you in. The entire circumstances of its scares are built on the idea that the audience is the final, unseen participant in the seance and the Zoom call. Another “victim”, as it were.

Host uses its grotesque invitation to voyeurism as its most successful trope: the audience will mostly be watching on a computer screen themselves (thanks to how Shudder is often consumed), after all. So when something grim happens, they aren’t just audience members, they’re participants, just as helpless and exhilarated as the other characters. And in recapturing how an actual seance feels and drip-feeding the suggestion that the viewer is involved too, this little, short horror film pulls off the kind of feat all horror movies should aspire to.

Which is precisely why Host is being called the best horror movie of 2020 – not that it has a great deal of competition – but also why the praise goes further than that in heralding it as a great movie in itself.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/host-movie-best-horror-2020/

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