Seylan guides them through the rituals so they can contact their respective loved ones. With Host, we’re privy to a Zoom-based séance gone horribly wrong: six friends - Haley Bishop, Radina Drandove, Edward “Teddy” Linard, Jemma Moore, Caroline Ward, and Emma Louise Webb, all playing characters with the same names - decide to while away quarantine by participating in a remote-conferencing ritual with a friend of Haley’s, a medium (Seylan Baxter). Screen-based horror is nothing new both of the Unfriended films have received quite the critical reappraisal, and Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching is a riveting multi-media thriller set entirely against a MacBook screen. If Rob Savage’s Host, the latest original from Shudder, is an indicator of the caliber of work we’re going to get, I welcome it.

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is stretching on into what is for many their fifth or sixth month, we’re finally seeing the kind of art that people are creating. But it’s also stifling, an awkward sea of muted mics, interrupting cats and relatives, the unceasing gaze of your own face looking back at you. For many of us, it’s our window into the outside world - we can finally talk to the friends and loved ones we can no longer see for fear of exposing each other to a deadly virus.

In the world that coronavirus has created, Zoom can feel like heaven and hell.

Shudder movie zoom