It took me a while to get to the quarantine-horror ‘Host’, which is streaming exclusively on Shudder, but once I dove in, I couldn’t find myself looking away.
In the film: “Six friends accidentally invite the attention of a demonic presence during an online séance and begin noticing strange occurrences in their homes.” Pretty much — you’ll pay for screwing around with the supernatural.
It’s hard to truly execute a horror movie using just a Zoom session, laptops, and cell phones, but Rob Savage knocked this out of the park as ‘Host’ is able to set a terrifying tone, execute some great death scenes, and tell an engaging story, confined to these platforms, and completely done during quarantine.
Good storytelling can’t be held back in this film.
‘Host’ packs a lot into 57 minutes, but most importantly, it generally imposes a tone of fear and tension during many of the films moments. The film maximizes every minute of screen time, doesn’t bore you with meaningless dialogue or backstory, and doesn’t rest on tired cliches that have been worked to death (no pun intended) during the found-footage/streaming horror era.
Easily one of the better horror films of 2020, and certainly a “must watch” during Halloween season, Shudder delivers a home-run!
