At 56 minutes, this is technically a short film, and that allows the story to move along at a really nice clip. Host’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. Cue 40 or so minutes of ghostly shenanigans. Her making up this fake ghost accidentally opens a bridge for something far more sinister to come in from the other side. The problem comes when Jemma (Jemma Moore) doesn’t take things seriously and makes up a story about a person named Jack who supposedly helped her when she cracked her head open a few years ago.

Haley (Haley Bishop) has a spiritual medium friend named Seylan (Seylan Baxter…there’s a theme to how these characters are named) who leads the group of six friends in their efforts to communicate with the dead. Host follows a small handful of characters who, in order to spice things up, decide to have a Zoom séance. And while it struggles to overcome some of the more annoying tropes in the horror sub-genre, it also offers a supernatural reflection of the anxiety caused by our current pandemic. Shudder’s Host is just that-a found footage horror movie centered around an ill-fated séance that takes place over Zoom. It’s well known that horror is often reflective of the times that it’s made in, so it was only a matter of time before a filmmaker came along and made a Zoom based horror movie.

Shudder zoom horror movie