As absurd as the premise might be, the film plays out with at least one foot on the ground, surprisingly, as characters mostly react in ways that seem rooted in reality. Inspired by a medium telling him that Covid-19 business was booming, he assembled a remote group of seven actors to play friends making the ill-advised decision to conduct a seance over video chat. In the frantic rush to keep busy and keep profitable, we’re seeing a flood of lazy made-at-home productions that will be forgotten whenever things go back to some sort of normal.Įarning a solid B for effort is the British director Rob Savage, who has taken the least appealing of concepts – a Zoom-based horror – and turned it into a genuinely effective little chiller called Host. But those restrictions were self-inflicted, not forced. The limitations they face recall those of the found-footage era, particularly the sub-subgenre of films that took place entirely within laptop screens, such as Unfriended and Searching. For directors, at least in some parts of the world, it’s starting to expand considerably but many are still stuck with making the best of very little, armed with just the most basic technology. We’re all still trapped in some way and while for many of us, that trap might have increased in scale in recent weeks, it remains a trap nonetheless. W hen it comes to films and shows made during the global pandemic, there’s a fine line between ingenuity and desperation.

Zoom call horror movie