The Movie That Will Change How You Look at Zoom Meetings

Read: Why low-budget horror is thriving this summer

The six friends are representative of a typical gathering of sheltering-in-place Millennials. There’s the girl who moved in too hastily with a significant other and now seems to regret it; another is back at home with a doddering dad. The sole guy of the group hit the quarantine jackpot and is staying at his new girlfriend’s rich parents’ country getaway. During the call, the women tease him for his newly grown man-bun and compliment one another on their natural looks. Nearly all of them are drinking; before the spiritualist they hired shows up, they conspire to take a shot every time she utters the phrase astral plane. In a nod to the big-picture realities of the pandemic, the bored Millennials tempt fate with their nonchalance toward an unseen danger.

One of Host’s chief accomplishments is its ability to refocus attention on what’s been normalized by COVID-19. Savage remystifies Zoom by reminding the audience of all its nerve-racking unpleasantries, finding parallels in horror tropes. A sense of foreboding is present from the start, when Haley, the organizer of the séance, appears on-screen nervously patting her hair. When Jemma, the first to arrive, enters, she makes the mistake of joining on two devices, prompting the appearance of a “doppelgänger.” Both Jemmas widen their eyes in mock terror as a banshee-screech of audio feedback begins to wail. As the film continues, these moments of humor fade. Sudden movements and noises trigger jarring, full-screen cuts to their source. When characters pick up their devices to explore the dark corners of their homes, Host takes on the precarious feel of a found-footage movie. Conversely, when characters leave the frame—initially to pee, and later on to die—the feeling of dread is even more oppressive.

Host isn’t the first horror or suspense film to play out on a computer screen (see 2014’s Unfriended, 2018’s Searching, and this year’s Followed), but its ability to immerse viewers in the action stands out. I felt myself entering self-protective mode for the first time when Haley, checking for strange noises in her apartment, turns up her output volume and asks her friends to listen. (I turned my volume down.) When another character hears a bump in the attic, she carries her device to a hatch in the ceiling and peers up before hurrying off to grab a tool that I’ll never look at the same way again: a selfie stick. When she returned to the attic, I said aloud in spite of myself: “Don’t make me go up there!”

This sense of absorption is frequently interrupted by pings from Zoom. Rather than reminding us of the movie’s artifice, these notifications assume the sinister air of messages from the beyond. As the free conference call creeps close to its time limit, a dialogue box appears on-screen to promote an upgrade. A simple cash grab that people usually ignore morphs into a life-and-death shakedown. When the call ends on cue at the 50-minute mark and the courtesy message “Thank you for choosing Zoom!” appears, it hits like a slap in the face. A demon might have ruined the virtual séance, but Zoom was the host of this paranormal nightmare.

Horror directors seek to subvert expectations of safe spaces, leaving viewers with brand-new fears after the movie has ended. The most famous example of this is perhaps Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; for many traumatized moviegoers, showers would never be the same. Fifteen years later, Steven Spielberg seemed hell-bent on destroying the idea of beachgoing as a pleasant summer pastime in Jaws. Its famous tagline—“You’ll never go in the water again”—wasn’t subtle. Rather than trying to instill a fear of sharks, Spielberg wanted his audience to get the heebie-jeebies every time they went swimming.