It's a swift and spooky achievement in horror filmmaking for this moment, but it also fits right in with the 'computer screen' film genre, a subset of the found footage genre. It's genuinely scary, eliciting many jumps and screams as the haunting escalates. There's even some excellent gags and scares with the Snapchat add-on filters and the digital background feature. The film was shot and edited from conception to release during the shutdown and makes ingenious use of the Zoom features we have come to know all too well: the waiting room, the dropped calls, watching your friend carry around their laptop or their phone topple off a table. A group of friends convene for a Zoom seance, and soon, incredibly spooky and terrifying things start to happen in each of their spaces, the danger only magnified by their isolation. 'Host,' directed by British filmmaker Rob Savage, takes place entirely on Zoom, the video-conferencing application that has taken over our lives since the COVID-19 shutdown in March. This week, the most popular movie on the film social networking site Letterboxd is a 57-minute horror film called 'Host,' available to stream on the horror-specific streaming service Shudder (take it for a spin with a weeklong free trial).

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