When the most terrifying horror film is... not even a film?

Ok, to be honest, the title it is a little clickbaitish. Guilty as charge. But, it has a point. For film, at least nowadays and when we not consider that any piece of analog video as a film, we tend to assume that a film must be feature length. This is not the case here. Host is a movie with a duration of less than an hour, not short enough to be consider a, redundantly, short film, but it is part of the forgotten art of medium film (in Spanish the term “mediometraje” sounds more intellectual.

Is this movie really the most terrifying? I am not confident enough to assure that. You could go to the safe place of saying Friedkins' The Exorcist or Kubrick's The Shinning, and probably you will be correct and no one will tell you otherwise. But, for better or worst, even when the atmosphere of this films is very tense and overwhelming, their idea of “terrofific” is a little outdated. A girl speaking languages that I do not understand, or people in dog costumes doing things that would not be approved to be said in this article (if you saw the uncut version), are not really something that I find terrifying; the first one is an uncomprehended genious girl and the second one is a very large community nowadays that pays really well for commissions.

I propose to look for something more, to put it in some way, historically scary. Not like in a historical movie, but look for cultural trends. One of the scariest horror movies, which led to questionable sequels but got a whole lot of money in the boxoffice, was The Blair Witch Project. The idea of found footage, lost from some kids who disappear in the shooting of a documentary, is a very strong premisse that, without showing a monster, made people not ever want to watch it again.

Continuing in this same idea, lets look at the Paranormal Activity movie, the first one, which also made a ton of money and more questionable sequels (there is a pattern here, but not the one I am trying to show). Again, a movie that shows nothing more than steps on flour and a ouija board on fire, but somehow was a phenomenon so scary that even the promotional material preferred to show people screaming in the theater because there was not really much to show from the movie.

The pattern here is that this both films are centered around a format that is meant to add realism to the story. The shotting with analog cameras, which material is literally touchable and could be lost, creates an erie feeling of truth, even when you know it is fiction. The same happens with the surveilance cameras, which bellow the awful digital noise and limited view angle generate a quite uncomfortable feeling of reality. There could be mention other examples that do this V/H/S, Unfriended and Rec, again, with abundance of not really good sequels. My point here is all this flicks have something in common: they use a gimmick to create a sensation of reality, while not showing anything to exagerated to pop the illusion (at least The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, which are the strongest of the list).

How you continue with this trend? You may be asking. Certainly, younger generations do not have the aesthetic sensibility to find analog cameras and poorly survilance videos as something in our daily life. But, we spend the whole day watching and interacting through a screen, a screen we have learn to love as a comfort zone and treasure it dearly. And, to that, Host adds our greatest real fear, which many of us did not expected to affect us so much until it was too late, the Pandemic [dramatic thunder noises].

Host is a movie about a group of teenagers, obviously played by actors who are evidently not teenagers as the cinema traditions dictate, that gather themselves throug a zoom meeting to, with the help of a medium, summon some spirit, which most of them just see as b*******t. But, suddenly, it all turns around when there in fact appears to be a presence that is behind this disrespectful group of teenagers. I had never noticed, but this is practically an slasher without a material killer…

The brilliance of this movie is not on their plot, but in the way it is executed. Rob Savage does a great job in this film, premiering it in the exact cultural moment and appealing to our confidence in the zoom meetings. In a world were we had to learn to use this software for everything, even experimenting with its most curious features, Host turns that into nightmare fuel. There is not only this unsetteling sense of realism, which works only on its primary level. The camara, even with its limited view angle, can be, and is, used by some characters to show others things they are not seeing, is a simple, and yet magnificent, way of creating dramatic irony and making you affraid about what will happen the the character in risk, even when he/she/they is not aware of it. Also we should add the idea of the film playing with the features of zoom meetings that we all have experienced, the masks that place where there is nothing, the false videos playing with you not understanding of what is happening, and the horrible abruptly end of a free zoom meeting after the time expires; the credits even appear as if the crew were members of the zoom meeting. The cherry on top is that its short lenght (really being a medium lenght) is perfect to not overuse the gimmick, avoiding the repetitiveness of Paranormal Activity and the third act of only an extreme close up of a girl crying in The Blair Witch Project.

Host is a lightning in a bottle. Not even the director when trying to make a feature length movie (The Boogeyman), even having a Stephen King's story, the magnifiscence of David Dastmalchian and all the support of Blumhouse, which where the ones who produced the film of surveillance cameras I may add, could create something at least memorable.

I do not believe I am the qualified person to say which is the most terrorific piece of cinematic media. But, there is something I can say, and that is that, even after watching almost any cult classic, every scary recomendation and also weird films that you find while navigating through your streaming services, I had never seen one film that had me at the edge of my seat almost loosing the battle against not looking away. I have seen this movie alone and in company, during the day and late at night, in a computer and on a TV, during the Pandemic and after it, and everytime it makes me scream like no other movie had managed to do. Maybe I am exagerating and my young traumas with the virus are getting the best of me, but you should at least give this movie a chance, it is less than one hour long, but with a multiple months of impact.