Becoming Host

This chapter addresses the uncanny effects of computer screen horror films during the pandemic by focusing on the British horror movie Host (2020), an independent 56-minute film directed by Rob Savage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The horror genre typically enables a kind of identificatory catharsis while also providing its viewership with the comfort of knowingly indulging in fiction. And yet, Host unsettles this very comfort and conceit. This essay argues that Host’s originality—and its uncanny horror—owes less to its content than to its visual form. The film’s unrelenting and unbroken point of view via the Zoom interface frames the entire film through a medium become all too familiar during the pandemic. This familiarity almost guilelessly interpellates the viewer as a hapless participant in the murderous mayhem that unfolds both onscreen and, by extension, in a pandemic present marked by existential threat and mass death. © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Irene Gammel and Jason Wang;individual chapters, the contributors.