My biggest concern when All This Shit™ started really popping off in my neighborhood around March—besides A) Dying, and B) The possibility I wouldn’t be watchingGodzilla vs. Kongin a theater come 2021—is that we, as a society, would normalize the idea of being stuck inside. That it would become less of an urgent matter we need to work to get through as quickly as possible and more of the thing we’re just living with, what-can-ya-do-shrug.gif? The jury is still out on me being alive and HBO Max just solidifiedtheGvKsituation, but Fear #3 was realized a while ago by the entertainment industry’s effort to get in on that sweet pandemic juice while the gettin' was good. It did not take long for Quarantine TV to pop up. Reactionary reunions like theParks & Recreationspecialwere a little more understandable, but soon after that came stories conceived and setduringthe COVID pandemic, mostly filmed remotely and over Zoom, and all striving to relatably capture This Moment. They’re all thematically similar in their own ways, but the thing they mostly have in common is that they’re straight-up terrible. Which is why it’s even more notable that one (1) of them emerged as a straight-up masterpiece of its genre. That’d be Shudder’sHost, directed byRob Savage.
Clocking in at a tight 57 minutes,Host’s premise is as deviously simple as its set-up. Six friends gather on a Zoom hang-out, with this week’s virtual group activity falling on Haley (Haley Bishop). She chooses a remote seance, hosted by a medium named Seylan (Seylan Baxter), which goes horribly awry when a joke from Jemma (Jemma Moore) invites a demonic presence into the proceedings.
Hostworks on its own terms as an effectively terrifying horror movie. Savage, working from a script he co-wrote withGemma HurleyandJed Shepherd, is endlessly clever in the ways he turns the Zoom format into jolts. Those 57 minutes wring youdry, man. That’s down to the inherent sense of isolation that comes with a virtual hang-out, yeah, but—like any great horror movie—Hostalso turns the stuff you don’t expect into a source of dread. Without spoiling, there’s a bit with a pre-programmed background that might be the jump-scare of the year, but it’s also deeply, darkly funny to anyone who has ever stressed over a fun background during a virtual meeting.
And that’s really what setsHostapart from its Quarantine TV counterparts, that fight-or-flight catharsis thatcan only come from horror. “Horror works best as allegory,” saidSinisterwriterC. Robert Cargillin a greatBBCpiece aboutHost. “It allows us to take our deepest fears and turn it into a monster that has a face, so we can literally look our fears in the eye, confront them and hopefully overcome them.”
By comparison, shows like Netflix’sSocial Distance, or NBC’sConnecting, or Freeform’sLove in the Time of Coronaoffer the immersion into lockdown life without any of the catharsis. In a rush to be empathetic, these shows check off “relatable” COVID soundbites faster thanThe MandalorianreferencesStar Warslore. “This was supposed to be two weeks, remember that?“Mike Colter’s struggling alcoholic character barks into the laptop camera in the first episode ofSocial Distance, which, yeah, of course you remember that. “This thing is disproportionally affecting black and brown and poor communities, you need to check your white privilege,” another character says inLove in the Time of Corona, which is infuriatingly true, but not how a human being has ever delivered information outside of a PowerPoint presentation.Connecting, a socially-distanced sitcom about “a group of friends trying to stay connected during a global pandemic”, was pulled from its NBC time slot after four episodes, never explaining why you wouldn’t just spend that time staying in contact with people you actually know.
Basically, these shows tried to depict life in 2020 without actually reflecting reality on an emotional level. It was, across the board, the definition of preaching to the choir, pitching platitudes to an audience who is like, “yeah,we know.” At their absolute worst, these shows had a distinctly after-school special feeling of trying to sand down the rough edges; it’s that surface-level idea of Going Through It without any specifics, much less ever suggesting someone might not have enough money to, you know, live. In that sense, the closest a piece of quarantine content came to touchingHostwas HBO’sCoastal Elites, playwrightPaul Rudnick’s series of five monologues originally destined for the New York stage, because at least that feltangry. What sunkCoastal Elitesis the broadness of that anger, to the point where even its best segments—likeDan Levyas an actor facing an all-too-realistic identity crisis—feel frustratingly hollow, the cinematic equivalent to tweeting directly to your social bubble. There can be no catharsis when the answer, to all these things, is “we know,we know.”
So it goes thatHost, which I must repeat features a demon tossing women out of windows and lighting dudes on fire, felt the most real to me. Yes, it does start with the required banter about These Times, but its tension isn’t built on top of it.Hostdoesn’t ask if the audience is okay, it knows the audience is goddamn scared. It knows that something horrific has invaded our lives and, what’s more, it knows the terror of facing it alone.
“I think people go to the cinema to be seen,” Savage said in that piece about his social-distanced horror. I didn’t recognize any of these characters gamely going through it.It was only in the frantic faces ofHostthat I saw my own.
