The Movie That Will Change How You Look at Zoom Meetings

An old house. Sleepaway camp. The woods outside Burkittsville, Maryland. Every generation has its dark places, settings where horror filmmakers stage the zeitgeist’s fears. During a pandemic, just about any spot where people congregate will do. But the new film Host takes an unexpected approach. The director Rob Savage sets his movie in a familiar virtual zone—a Zoom session—flipping the script on the current conventional wisdom that online meetings are a safe alternative to in-person gatherings. In reality, of course, they are. But Savage’s film portrays the paranoia that haunts the housebound this summer as a demonic entity unleashed by a Zoom call.

The first great entry in a genre already dubbed “,” imparts the message that nowhere is safe—especially not the online spaces that Big is about a group of friends who hold a virtual séance over Zoom on July 30, 2020: the same day the movie premiered on the . The circumstances of ’s production lend the film a realism that makes viewers feel as though they themselves are on the call. (The actors even use their real first names.) As the movie begins and the characters join one by one in their comfy clothes and pajamas, the mood is festive and reminiscent of the early days of the coronavirus, when non-work-related Zoom hangouts felt like a novelty.