Host is a 2020 British-American horror-mystery from director Rob Savage that unfolds entirely inside a video call, turning the familiar grid of lockdown-era faces into a stage for something far older and nastier than a dropped connection.
What is Host about?
Stuck at home and bored of the same conversations, six friends decide to spice up their weekly video chat by booking a medium to guide them through a séance over the screen. Nobody takes it especially seriously at first; the mood is closer to a party game than a ritual. Then the tone shifts. Small oddities creep into each person's room, the medium's warnings start to feel less like theatre, and the friends realise that whatever they have invited in does not need an open door to reach them. Cut off from one another physically and able to watch only through their laptops, they are forced to confront the possibility that the night may not end with everyone still on the call.
About the cast
The cast is led by Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova and Caroline Ward, with Edward Linard, Seylan Baxter and Alan Emrys completing the ensemble. Because almost the entire picture plays out in webcam windows, the performers carry the film with little more than their faces and the space immediately behind them, and the naturalistic, overlapping chatter of the opening stretch is what makes the later shocks land.
Context & significance
Shot and released during the first year of the pandemic, Host belongs to the screenlife strand of horror, where the story is told through a computer desktop rather than conventional camera coverage. At under an hour it is unusually compact for a feature, and that brevity is part of its design: there is no subplot or breathing room, just a single escalating session. Rob Savage directs, and the film's lockdown setting, the awkward etiquette of video calls and the way a frozen frame can become sinister are all woven into the scares rather than treated as background detail.
Watching Host on Ktime
Host streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can choose whichever suits the room. Watching requires a K-Time account; this page is free to read, and once you log in the title plays through K-Time's Farsi interface built for Iranian viewers abroad.