What’s more, the fact that it looked rubbish actually made the found-footage film believable. When you do catch it, it’s liminal – a split-second glimpse or a blurry outline obscured by a night vision lens. But it was also terrifying, because the threat to our protagonists almost always lies just out of shot. The Blair Witch Project, to put it bluntly, is aesthetically rubbish – the shaky-cam effect meant that moviegoers notoriously experienced motion sickness and some even threw up in cinema lobbies. It went on to gross a hefty $248.6m at the box office, smashing the record for an indie film at the time. Shot by three students on handheld video cameras over a long weekend, the film cost a mere $35,000 (in the film budget world, that’s pennies). The most famous example of this is when The Blair Witch Projectchanged the landscape for DIY filmmakers in 1999. There is a unique relationship between technical constraints and horror: sometimes, limitations force creators to think outside the box, which actually makes their movies far spookier. The video-chat format only adds to the film’s brilliance. So, we watch the rag-tag group as they are petrified and tortured in the individual little Brady Bunch-boxes that are now synonymous with modern-day communication. But for Host, there’s a twist: the entire film was made during lockdown and is set on the ubiquitous video-conferencing service, Zoom. Our protagonists, monsters and surroundings are horror archetypes at this point – youngish attractive white characters anonymous demonic spirits that want to torment and kill them and big empty house(s). The premise, from writers Rob Savage, Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley, may seem a little unassuming, as six friends are roped into a seance and may not live to tell the tale.
This rule holds just as true in 2020 – and in the same vein, Host, the new British-made laptop-horror movie that’s leaving audiences shaking, is a film about our anxieties around coronavirus. Marking the dawn of science fiction, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as an expression of people’s enlightenment-era fears surrounding scientists playing God. When critics look back to the very earliest horrors, we see King Kong as a metaphor for the Great Depression and the perceived threat of black men to white society. Whether or not we know it at the time, horror stories have always reflected our societal anxieties.
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