“Then everyone roped in their partners and parents to help with things like pulling strings to make things move around on-screen. To get the cameras rolling, so to speak, the actors got sent an iPhone, which they taped to the back of their laptop so the phone camera captured the point of view of a Zoom call. Time magazine describes it as: "Not only one of the best horror movies of the year, but also an intimate look at creativity, film production and a shared global culture in the throes of a rampaging virus."Īs Shepherd puts it: “While everyone else was making banana bread, we made a film.” The two-week deadline to come up with a script, then 12 weeks to make the film, resulted in a 56-minute-long fright-fest. However, Shepherd says: "Shudder was the only studio that could see the potential of making it in lockdown because everyone else wanted to wait until after." Naturally, content-hungry studios and streaming platforms all came a-knocking. 'Host' began as a Zoom prank by British horror director Rob Savage. He put it up on Twitter and when the website Ladbible picked up on it, it got 17 million views in two days." "All the while our friends were freaking out, and I'm trying to keep a straight face. He went up there and had something jump out on him, then he fell down the ladder and played dead. So, he got us all on Zoom then said he’d heard a noise in his attic. “When we ran out of films, Rob told me he wanted to prank our friends. "In early lockdown in the UK last year, I started a WhatsApp group that was a quarantine movie club, and invited all my filmmaker friends – actors, producers, stunt guys – so we could watch films on Netflix together," says Shepherd. "You've got 12 weeks." ‘We were just making a film for our friends, with our friends’ "Now go away and make it," the company said. Or, as the New York Times puts it, a horror that "speaks to our moment of uncertainty". In this instance, the creeping sense of impending doom the pandemic had unleashed across the globe. Shepherd and his co-writers, Savage and Gemma Hurley, got together – over Zoom calls, of course, because London was deep into a tier 3 lockdown then – to craft a nerve-twangingly terrifying jump-fest that, while owing plenty to 1999's genre-subverting The Blair Witch Project, also managed to perfectly capture the modern zeitgeist.
US streaming service Shudder not only greenlit the project and put up the cash, but also said: "You've got two weeks to put a script together."
By the time he woke up, his two-word idea – "Zoom seance" – was pitched by Savage to some of the biggest horror production studios in the world.
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