Ghost In The Machine [Review: Host]

Housebound under lockdown conditions, Haley and her friends decide to use their weekly Zoom call to carry out an online séance. Haley (Haley Bishop) has hired a medium, Seylan (Seylan Baxter), to lead them in what will no doubt be a fun, entertaining evening without anything sinister or dangerous happening. What could possibly go wrong?

Host (2020) is a found-footage horror movie that takes place in real time during a Zoom call. It’s not in any way related to The Host (2013), the movie based on Stephenie Meyer’s alien parasite rom com novel reviewed here, or to Korean newt-based horror The Host (2006), reviewed here. Host is set during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic - and it was also filmed during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, during a period of lockdown. Cast and crew could not leave their own homes so had to set up equipment and film themselves at home, with director Rob Savage guiding them remotely. The concept of the Zoom séance is a clever way to make a film under these tough conditions.

Other aspects of the film add to the improvised feel – the cast all use their own names, and family members appear in cameo or supporting roles. The script makes good use of all the Zoom cliches we’ve grown to love tolerate over the past year – sound and vision glitches, people joining while mute, dodgy animated backgrounds, pyjamas and badly-timed Ocado deliveries. Acting is excellent, there’s a lot of humour, and there’s a good, gradual ramping up of tension leading to full-on catastrophe.

In a year where making any movie has been difficult, a crew have come together against the odds to release a new, low-budget, creepy and effective horror movie not unlike Paranormal Activity, reviewed here. In fact my only criticism of this movie is that it is a little too like Paranormal Activity, with one or two fright scenes almost borrowed wholesale. For this reason, although I really enjoyed Host, I am only giving it three stars.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars.

It's Only A Paper Moon [Review: Apollo 18]

Has the found footage genre had its day? Apollo 18 might be a good point to stand the genre down. True, at time of writing it has a meta-review score of 28% over at Rotten Tomatoes. True, it tells an unoriginal and highly predictable story within a lazy, generic Military-Government Conspiracy (TM) frame. True, it was launched at a press conference where dumb claims were made about the providence of the footage. Yawn.

In its favour, this is one of the few found footage films where the basic premise makes sense. Most FF films require the presence of an obsessive filmmaker or videographer: look, if some fifty-storey tentacled sea-beast and it's crab-like spawn are pursuing you through New York as the skyscrapers collapse around you, and you are actually sane, would you a) drop everything and run, or b) keep hold of fifty kilos of professional film equipment? What better way to show your girlfriend how much you love her than to stand there and video her while she is being attacked by demons? 

It is logical that an Apollo moonship would carry lots of cameras, and that the astronauts would film everything. The film has purportedly been edited together from a collection of sources by a mysterious conspiracy website: so thankfully there's no attempt to tell the story in real time. Different film sources have different colours and looks, plus some are hand-held while others are fixed, remote controlled or motion-sensitive: so there's much more shot variety, and slightly less nausea-inducing shakycam (even so, you may still wish to take your preferred travel sickness pill before viewing.) It helps. Performances are good although not Oscar-worthy, sets and visuals are authentic. While Apollo 18 might not be the best advertisement for the future of the space programme (that would be Space Camp, obviously) the film really does bring back the magic and high drama of the Apollo missions: for me this was more of a draw than the horror element.

Directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch.) I enjoyed this film but I concede it could have been better.

Location, Location, Location

Indie filmmakers are often advised to limit films to the minimum number of sets, and I can personally vouch for this: moving from place to place and setting up over and over again in new locations wears everyone out and eats up valuable slate time.

Some films make a virtue out of this minimalist approach: Exam (review to follow) and the Cube series are all based around ingeniously designed one-room sets, while Buried goes even further and sets all the action in a coffin. Other variations include 127 Hours featuring a protagonist trapped on a mountain, while the two swimmers in Open Water spend the entire movie treading water and avoiding sharks.

This inventiveness also extends to other minimalist films like Phone Booth which is based around one location although the action does cut away sometimes, or The Hole (2001, starring Thora Birch, not the many other films with the same name) with a single location for about two-thirds of the film.

This is not a new phenomenon and there are some classic one-room films: Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men is superb and influential (leading into, for example, several of Tony Hancock’s television plays.) Several people also recommended Hitchcock’s Rear Window to me, a classic film I have yet to see.

There are also plenty of films that are limited to a single building or suite of rooms such as 1408 or Paranormal Activity. Films set inside aeroplanes also have a similar feel – Flightplan, Snakes On A Plane, Airplane! A group of people trapped in a house is a trope of the whodunnit genre, from Agatha Christie’s novels and their adaptations to another classic Sleuth: as with Cube, Exam and Paranormal Activity, the limitations are part of the puzzle which has to be solved if we are to escape.

One-location films subvert the potential scope of cinema – the freedom of the camera, and therefore the narrative, to go anywhere. It’s closer to theatre where, with exceptions, a small number of locations is the rule. These films also create an intense experience by playing on common fears of confinement. There may be a metaphorical explanation for many of these locations: life itself, or the Earth, is limited in all sorts of ways, and ultimately there is only one escape from it although we may dream of others.

With thanks to all the blogcatalog members who helped me research this article.

Guerillas In The Mist [Review: Urban Ghost Story]

Urban Ghost Story is directed by Genevieve Jolliffe and produced by Chris Jones, authors of the Guerilla Film-Maker's guidebooks. Nine years before Paranormal Activity, this film brought the ghost story into a downbeat setting: Glasgow, a block of flats, complete with poverty, loan sharks, drug use and teenage pregnancies, and it brought the paranormal together with real-life menace to create a tense, creepy atmosphere.

The ghost story element is intelligent and non-patronizing - possible explanations for the entity are presented by characters we don't quite trust so there is no glib solution to the mystery, and in any case it's really a film about trauma. The heroine, Lizzie, has survived a car crash in which her best friend died, but is traumatized over and over again by the crash itself, the mysterious happenings that follow it, and then by the various responses from the police and social services, the spiritualists who terrorize her and the para-scientists who tie her to her bed for one more experiment.

This is an awesome film which I would recommend to anyone, with a great story and a lot to say about trauma. It has a strong cast, headed by child actress Heather Ann Foster who plays Lizzie perfectly, and has a memorable look: it's filmed in drab blues and greens that perfectly convey the mood of despair and fear, offset by the bright colours of the goldfish, a symbol of Lizzie's dilemma that appears throughout the film.