“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. In honor of this film’s release, we’re looking at ten other in-screen horror films that’ll make you think twice before joining that Zoom call.Host is a cinematic marker like no other of how drastically the last 12 months have changed the world. It’s a gorgeous hybrid of what it means to exist as a young person online. Schoenbrun juggles the ennui born of digital isolation with Zoom calls, YouTube videos, ASMR, and more. Recently, Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going To The World’s Fair hit streaming and it’s a gorgeous mix of narrative and in-screen horror. Whether you call it in-screen horror, second screen horror, or screen life, it all boils down to one thing: digital terror. Human monsters have better access to us, and don’t even need to invade your house to inflict living hell. Ghosts and demons can’t be stopped by wires and the ethereal Cloud in fact, they can infect us in larger numbers at unfathomable speeds (see Pulse as one of the first films to tackle such an idea). It’s one that goes inside the computer as it were, with desktops and Zoom calls dominating the frame. As the digital age has consumed more and more of our daily lives, horror has, of course, taken to adapting that obsession into a new kind of found footage format. It’s a series of tubes that have given us both unlimited access to information and access to some of the most heinous things the world has to offer.

Horror film zoom call