I figured, OK, I probably should check it out just in case it’s like an ax murderer living up there. It was the one room that I hadn’t checked out. Before lockdown started, I had just moved into this new apartment and I had genuinely been hearing weird noises coming from my attic - like footsteps above my bedroom. We were doing Netflix parties and Zoom Happy Hours and all that good stuff. Can you elaborate?īasically everyone in the movie and behind the scenes were just the people that I was hanging out with anyway on Zoom when lockdown began. I heard the movie idea came from a prank you played on your friends. (All actors use their real names in the film.) Things go predictably awry, giving viewers a nightmare-inducing look at loneliness in the pandemic age - a time when most of our social interactions come courtesy of our laptop camera. The result was Host, a Shudder original film in which a group of friends (Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova, Caroline Ward and Edward Linard) gather over Zoom to conduct a seance during quarantine. A horror director by trade, though, it wasn’t long before Savage felt the need to bend his current reality into an even greater nightmare.Īfter playing a Zoom prank on friends in which he was attacked by an attic-dwelling zombie - which then went viral - the director teamed up with writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd to write a movie for the pandemic age.

The urge is understandable as months pass by in quarantine, sometimes we just want to watch something scarier than what’s outside our window - especially when, like Savage, you live in a metropolis like London whose denizens have forsaken masks and social distancing out of sheer boredom. “A fun roller-coaster that you can watch and forget about what’s going on for a bit.” “I wanted something that was a bit removed ,” he tells Rolling Stone. Ten minutes into the latter’s 1972 epic Solaris, though, Savage gave up and turned on Halloween 4. When lockdown began, British director Rob Savage intended to make the best of his isolation - digging out classics by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and all the rest.

Zoom horror movie shudder