“I’ve worked with Dan Martin a bunch of times and he’s one of the people we had on our initial list of cool people. Which I think is why a lot of it feels so authentic.” Crafting the visual effects So a lot of the reactions you are getting in the film are them genuinely reacting to their friends dying in front of them or something jumping out or exploding. Then like we did on the prank video, when we were shooting on the day, I was able to cede that into Zoom and get the guys to react in real time, not knowing what was going to happen. We cut those together and we added in sound effects and made them properly scary. So the first thing we shot was all the stunts and all the scares. We knew how everyone was going to die, and we knew what the scares were going to be, and we didn’t tell the actors any of it. “One of the things I was keen to do off the back of the prank video is withhold a lot of stuff from the cast.

This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Here he explains how this unique production came together.

But what starts out as innocent fun quickly takes a sinister turn, with an evil spirit invading their homes and putting all their lives in danger.Īs well as acting in the film, the cast did their own make-up, lit their own scenes, operated their own cameras, and created their own practical effects, while Rob directed them all from his own front room.

Host revolves around six friends who ask a medium to oversee a séance over Zoom. But while the rest of us were making banana bread, doing PE with Joe Wicks and watching Tiger King, writer-director Rob Savage – best known for horror short Dawn of the Deaf – was hard at work.Īnd what started out as a prank to scare his friends turned into Host, a genuinely terrifying flick that hits streaming service Shudder this week. The film industry ground to a halt in March when coronavirus forced much of the world into lockdown. A still from Host, the new horror film shot during lockdown, by Rob Savage.

Host film shudder