“Horror cinema in particular has a long tradition of this. “Books and films can let us wrap our heads around things we’re going through by putting it into metaphor,” says the novelist and screenwriter C Robert Cargill, known for his work on Marvel’s Doctor Strange and lauded 2012 horror Sinister. Pop culture has a long history of being a space for audiences to work out their collective traumas. There’s certainly a precedent for the latter. Do audiences want entertainment that distracts them from the stresses of the pandemic? Or does Host teach us that there’s a hunger for films, novels and so on that address our current global situation, helping us work through some of our emotions, frustrations and fears related to the New Normal? The extent of that connection with viewers raises questions for the film industry and beyond, as creators of movies, literature, video games and more attempt to work out what sort of stories to tell in a post-Covid-19 world. “I was really worried that people would dismiss the film, that they’d think it’s opportunistic or gimmicky. Immediately, the horror community started singing its praises while soon, more mainstream outlets were taking notice, from Good Morning America to the New York Times, who heralded it a horror that “speaks to our moment of uncertainty.” The film rocketed Shudder to record audience figures (the service reported breaking 1 million subscribers shortly after Host’s release), made a horror A-lister of its director (Savage was quickly snapped up by acclaimed production company Blumhouse to direct three new movies) and sparked so much interest that on Friday, the film will enter UK cinemas for a limited theatrical run.
Host’s smart concept and imaginative scares – utilising internet glitches, face filters and other facets of our largely digital post-coronavirus existences – made it a cult sensation from the moment it launched on specialist horror streaming service Shudder in July. Instead, it became a phenomenon: Host, the word-of-mouth masterclass in frightful suspense, made almost overnight, that bottled the panic and paranoia of our pandemic year. “It was a project to stop me going mad,” laughs Savage.
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“Covid changed the entire way we interact so quickly,” says Savage, who recalls the strangeness of how “we all started talking about infection rates and death tolls the way we used to talk about the weather.” The director – who before Host, had only a few short films, commercials and TV credits to his name – initially planned to “eat too much, drink too much and play The Last of Us” through lockdown, but he soon found himself in desperate need of a distraction. – An explosive final role for a film icon Zoom was also largely unknown back then: it was not until March, when countries retreated into quarantine, separating friends and families, that the video conferencing tool became part of the fabric of our lives. Nor did the pandemic that forms the movie’s distressing real-life backdrop, with Covid-19 at that point limited to just a handful of reported cases near the wet markets of Wuhan. A year ago, the low-budget horror film – about a group of friends who enact a seance over Zoom for a laugh during lockdown – did not exist, not even as an idea in the mind of director Rob Savage.
Host is a cinematic marker like no other of how drastically the last 12 months have changed the world.
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