Everything happens over Zoom, now. Even séances. Host (2020), directed by independent British filmmaker Rob Savage, follows a group of friends who make the ill-informed decision to conduct a séance over Zoom. The group is whittled down, one by one, as they confront a supernatural entity they conjure through the internet. Host reveals the Zoom room as a haunted space, one that requires constant negotiation with (un)reality and disruptions in spatiality. While filmmakers around the world have been working with found footage for decades, the social upheaval of COVID-19 created a unique opportunity for horror to address our complicated relationship with technology during this period of forced isolation, collective grief, and desperate uncertainty.
Check out the trailer for Host, which is streaming on Shudder:
Generally, we can say that the narrative technologies chosen to frame any piece of horror media are defined—and haunted—by what they leave out. The shadow is frightening for what unseeable shape casts it, silence mounts imagined noises until the jump scare is almost a relief, and what happens off camera feeds into individualized nightmares and speculation.
In his book, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic, Seb Franklin outlines the ways digitality works to structure our relationships, labor practices, and communicative world. Central to the logic of digitality, Franklin contends, is a process of capture that designates what belongs to a given digital representation, and what must be excluded (xix-xx). While much of visual media can be said to work to make this very process of filtering invisible—so the production is immersive and seamless—the subgenre of the found footage horror film intentionally calls attention to its own limitations, its framing, its shakiness, and ultimately, its fallibility. In doing so, the found footage genre announces itself as both paradoxically unreal and hyperreal.
How do we measure horror’s credibility?
Early colonial stories of the supernatural negotiated their truth claims through particular appeals to credibility. For instance, at the beginning of The Authenticated History of the Bell Witch, the narrator writes:
Before entering upon an investigation or going into details of the acts and demonstrations of the Bell Witch, it is proper that the reader should know something of the Bell family and citizens of the community who witnessed the manifestations, expended their energies in trying to discover the origin and force of the phenomena, and who in connection with the Bell family, give credence to the truth of these statements. (Ingram 2)
Stories of witches and demons and ghosts could be trusted because the tellers of these stories came from ‘pure blood lines’, were white and god-fearing settlers with conventional roles and lives. Audiences reading these truth claims understood that they were fictional, but participated in having their attention drawn to this masquerade of factuality.
Rather than an incidental side effect of the genre, or a gimmick, found footage’s contradictory truth claim is central to the anxiety inherent to the construction of reality and unreality, distinctions which, as Avery Gordon argues require “comprehension and articulation, being themselves modalities of the exercise of unwanted power” (xvii).
So, when confronting horrific works with these truth claims, it’s worthwhile to consider what their claims to factuality are founded upon.
As Cecilia Sayad notes, the found footage film takes this long-standing notion of horrific realism to the extreme by literally framing film as a factual fragment of reality (45). Perhaps the most well-known found footage horror film, The Blair Witch Project (1999), begins with this frame:
We can ask ourselves: what is this truth claim founded upon?
At first glance, it appears that earlier appeals to the tellers’ relationship to hegemonic power are missing. Instead of a storyteller with good breeding and otherwise logical faculties, the found footage horror film derives its credibility through the technology of its production.
However, the video recordings acting as a stand-in for truth claims requires critical attention. Links abound between the technological presence of the documentary camera and the colonizing gaze that seeks to control, tame, and otherwise make sense of pre-imagined entities.
Just as the handheld video camera requires critical attention as its own proprietor of truth, we might consider what is embedded into the truth claim established through Host’s use of the Zoom medium.
More so than The Blair Witch Project, films that take place entirely over computer screen—like The Den (2013), Unfriended 1 & 2 (2014, 2018), and now Host (2020)—reflect the ways that notions of credibility, embodiment and disembodiment, and documentation have become further condensed and destabilized in the post-digital age.
No longer is there a safe separation between the camera, the hand that holds it, and the woods set off from society.
Now, all of the elements of narrative production have become domesticated, have moved out of the woods and into the keyboard. The same connection that allows access to friendship also brings the beast to their bedrooms. This (dis)embodied sociality makes almost too much sense to us right now. What we crave offers the threat of contagion, and we are together in that we make one another vulnerable to the same spirits, and also isolated, in that we have no means of banding together in the flesh.
The séance is set up for success. It doesn’t become deadly until Jemma (Jemma Moore) invents a character. She says that she is speaking to a friend named Jack who committed suicide. She sews him out of the air because she is bored with the séance and doesn’t think anything will happen.
After the medium finds out that Jemma made up her friend Jack, she says: “By inventing a person who doesn’t exist we’ve summoned a false spirit. […] You created a mask and anything can come through and wear that mask.”
The same concerns that are playing out with the professed reality and perceived unreality of the found footage horror film ultimately lead the characters within the movie to be punished. In this way, Host presents horrific realism’s violent reckoning with itself and its own assumptions regarding punishment, documentation, and the chaos of our relationships with narrative technologies.
The mask, created and left for the uses of whatever spirits approach, speaks succinctly to our understanding of digital technologies, which possess the potential to be co-opted for radical uses in both destructive and life-giving directions. Host reminds us of the stakes of understanding the relationship between horror, technologies of communication, and the construction of reality and unreality. For the found footage horror film, it remains to be seen what future incarnation will put this mask on, and what will be spoken through it.
Works Cited:
Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. MIT Press, 2015.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Ingram, Martin Van Buren. An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch. 1894.
Sayad, Cecilia. “Found-Footage Horror and the Frame’s Undoing.” Cinema Journal, vol. 55, no. 2 (2016), pp. 43-66.
Lauren Gilmore is an incoming MA student in Lehigh University’s Literature and Social Justice program. She is interested in horror literature and media, digital resistance movements, and the relationship between the horrific and communicative technologies. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Outdancing the Universe, from University of Hell Press. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming from Hayden’s Ferry’s Review, Ghost City Press, Rogue Agent, and other journals. She lives with her partner and two small dogs. You can find out more about her at her website, laurengilmore.com.
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