It centers on a group of six friends who perform a séance on a videoconference naturally, things go wrong. Shot entirely by the film’s cast in their own homes, director Rob Savage’s movie-inspired by a prank he pulled on his friends-was made in less than three months. It’s no wonder, then, that one of the first features made during the Covid-19 pandemic- Host, which hits the streaming service Shudder on Thursday-is set in Zoom. 2014’s The Den also leaned heavily on video chat. Its sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web, did the same. Way back in 2014, director Levan Gabriadze set his entire film Unfriended in a Skype call between a handful of friends. In many ways, the genre is proving prescient when it comes to the limited kinds of movies filmmakers can attempt during lockdown. In March and April, we were just getting like, ‘Hey man, we just ended up thinking about Searching!’ and it was like, ‘OK cool, so is everybody.’” “It just felt like nobody was realizing that everybody was having this same realization, that you can make something on a computer screen, or at least make projects on it a little faster during this time,” he says. Friends in the business would write saying they’d just ended a meeting where Searching had come up, and everyone was wondering if the team behind it had any similar tricks up their sleeves. Originally, the inquiries “felt very smart,” Chaganty says.

That’s when Chaganty’s inbox started getting bombarded. As a result, studios and filmmakers began looking for a way to keep working from home. As fears over the new coronavirus spread, social-distancing necessities rendered work on TV and film sets nearly impossible. Back in March, Hollywood effectively shut down.

Host horror movie zoom