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. “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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