Movie Reviews

‘Host’ Proves Zoom Calls Were Always a Horror Concept

Published

1 month ago

March 6, 2026

Let me paint you a picture. It is 2020. You are sitting alone in your apartment. You have not left in eleven days. Your hair is doing something experimental. You open your laptop, join a video call, and spend forty five minutes staring at your own face in the corner of the screen while your coworkers discuss Q3 metrics in real time.

Now tell me that is not already a horror film. Go ahead. I will wait.

Rob Savage waited too, and then he made Host, a fifty-seven minute masterpiece of pandemic anxiety that understood something the rest of us were too busy panic-buying flour to notice: Zoom was never a communications platform. It was a haunted house that we all agreed to move into simultaneously and on purpose.

What It Is

Six friends. One Zoom call. One medium hired to lead an online séance because apparently two hours of watching Tiger King was not enough novelty for a Tuesday night in lockdown. One friend who decides mid-séance to invent a fake spirit for a laugh. Which, predictably, summons something that is very real and extremely unhappy about being lied to.

The demon’s reaction is, honestly, fair. Nobody likes being mocked. Unfortunately, its method of expressing this is somewhat more extreme than leaving a passive aggressive note.

What follows is fifty-seven minutes of genuine, efficient, deeply unnerving horror that earns a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and a permanent place on the short list of films that used their limitations as weapons rather than excuses.

Rob Savage directed the entire thing remotely. The cast ran their own cameras, did their own lighting, performed their own stunts, and applied their own makeup. All of which somehow produces an end result that feels more authentic and immediate than films with fifty times the budget and none of the ingenuity.

Why the Zoom Format Is Doing Real Work

Here is the thing about horror that takes place on a screen you recognize. Your brain cannot fully disengage. The glitchy video, the bad lighting, the awkward silences while someone fumbles with their unmute button. All of that is stored somewhere in your nervous system from 2020 through at least 2022, and Host reaches in and grabs it with both hands.

The filters are scary. The backgrounds are scary. The specific anxiety of watching six tiny rectangles at once knowing that something is happening in one of them, and you cannot watch all of them simultaneously, that is actually, genuinely, psychologically destabilizing in a way that a dark hallway simply is not anymore. We know what is in the dark hallway. We have seen that film. However, we have not fully processed what it means to watch a friend’s Zoom background shift slightly and not be sure if it was the connection.

Savage knows exactly which corners to put the camera in. He knows when to use the filter, there is a sequence involving a flour-dusted floor and a Snap Camera ghost face that is one of the best scares in modern found footage, and he knows when to just let an empty doorway sit there long past the point of comfort. The sound design is doing equally heavy lifting. You hear something from one of the screens, and then you cannot figure out which one and by the time you do it is already too late.

The Part Where We Talk About Jemma

Every horror film needs a person who makes the bad decision that starts everything, and Host delivers one for the ages. Jemma invents a dead friend during the séance as a joke. She makes up a name, makes up a story, the medium believes her, and then the medium explains in great detail that fabricating spirits during a séance is essentially an open invitation to anything nearby that wants to fill that shape.

Jemma did not know this. Jemma does know it now. The Letterboxd review that simply reads “this séance could have been an email” is the most accurate horror criticism written in the last five years and I will not hear otherwise.

What It Means Now

Host was made fast, twelve weeks from concept to Shudder release, on a budget of one hundred thousand dollars, and it landed with the force of a much larger film because it was made by people who understood that the scariest thing on any screen is the thing you cannot quite see yet. Savage parlayed this into a deal with Blumhouse, went on to make Dashcam and The Boogeyman, and is now one of the more interesting directors working in the genre.

But Host specifically has a shelf life that its contemporaries do not. The quarantine novelty has faded. What remains is a tightly constructed horror film about the specific dread of reaching for other people across a digital void and finding something else on the other end instead. That feeling is not going anywhere. If anything, it is getting more relevant.

We are still on the calls. We are still staring at our own faces in the corner of the screen. Ultimately, we are still waiting for something in someone else’s background to move.

Host is streaming on Shudder. Watch it on your laptop in a dark room, which is the only correct way to watch it and the filmmakers will tell you so themselves.

Do not invite anyone else to the call.

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Movie Reviews

‘And Her Body Was Never Found’ Takes Found Footage Somewhere New

Published

2 weeks ago

April 2, 2026

Luna Gray

Mor Cohen and Polaris Banks made a film about their real relationship. It opens the way you might expect a film about a real relationship to open, which is to say: uncomfortably.

The film opens on a man masturbating onto his wife’s chest while the two of them sit in a river. This is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is very much a metaphor, but it is also literally happening on screen. He keeps asking her to take her yop off. She doesn’t want to. He keeps asking anyway, because that is what this man does with every limit he runs into, he treats it as a negotiation he is already winning.

This is how And Her Body Was Never Found introduces itself at SXSW 2026. Buckle up.

Two Bodies in the Frame

After the river, the cinematography immediately tells you where you stand. We see the back of her head in close-up, frame-filling, a wall of hair and refusal. He is in the far distance behind her, trying to to keep up. She is not waiting. You read the entire relationship before anyone opens their mouth again.

When they do sit down, she offers him a sandwich. It is a peace offering. It is an olive branch. In the context of this relationship, it is a mistake, because he immediately uses the olive branch to restart the argument. If you have ever loved someone profoundly frustrating, this scene will reach through the screen and grab you by the collar in the most empathetic possible way.

The fight spirals the way real fights spiral, not toward a point but away from one. Semantics get weaponized. He gaslights. The argument rolls over everything except the actual subject. She gets to the point where she raises a stick, and honestly, given the last forty-eight hours, a jury of her peers would understand completely. At the campsite that evening, she tells him she is done. The marriage is over.

The next morning, he says everything right. Every single thing. The full lovebombing playbook: the apology that sounds like he finally gets it, the warmth that feels real, the version of him she fell for showing up right on schedule. Anyone who has ever stood at that crossroads recognizes this moment in their bones. The film does not editorialize. It just watches.

The Cliff Scene

The film’s pivot arrives at a cliff overlook, with something that sounds unmistakably like Wizard of Oz music underneath it. She stands away from the cliff edge, keeping her distance from him. The film makes it clear she is briefly considering how easy it would be to resolve this situation unilaterally. He guilts her onto the ledge through emotional blackmail dressed as a trust exercise.

And then he pushes her.

This is where And Her Body Was Never Found breaks itself open. The take ends. The characters step out. Mor and Polaris are no longer their characters. They are Mor and Polaris, and he is furious about where his hand landed, and she is shaken in a way that does not feel scripted, because it is not scripted, because this part is not the movie anymore. She refuses to continue the scene.

The fourth wall does not just come down here. It gets dismantled and examined.

Blair Witch Country

A cut to night. She is in her tent, filming herself on her phone in vertical format. The frame is narrow and confining. The dark outside is absolute. She says out loud that it would be easy to kill her out here and get rid of the body. Nobody would know.

The Blair Witch Project comparison is not subtle and does not need to be. It is being invoked consciously, as a reference point for what it feels like when the camera becomes the only witness. The found footage mode here is not an aesthetic choice so much as evidence collection, and the film is smart about what that implies.

The film’s formal announcement that it is a meta project, two filmmakers making something about their own fights, arrives here. It reconfigures everything that preceded it without invalidating any of it.

Hat on a Hat on a Hat

This is also where the film begins to strain, just slightly. And Her Body Was Never Found has already broken the fourth wall once, then reconstructed it, then broken it again. Characters comment on the layers. The commentary becomes its own layer.

The film ends somewhere past the point where you can usefully track what is cinema and what is meta and what is real. That disorientation is partly the point. It is also, at a certain moment past the film’s last clean beat, a miscalculation. The movie keeps going after it has already landed.

What Banks and Cohen Got Right

A lot, is the answer. The performance dynamics are precise in a way that indie horror rarely achieves. The cinematography is working on multiple levels simultaneously. The abuse arc is drawn with enough specificity to feel observed rather than constructed, which is not a small thing when both filmmakers are also the subjects.

Polaris Banks and Mor Cohen are making something genuinely new here. Other critics at SXSW noted how cleverly written the film is. That is true. It is also, in places, too clever for its own good, and the film never entirely resolves the tension between those two facts. The overreach at the end does not undo what precedes it. It just means the thing that is most impressive about this project, the willingness to keep pushing the structure past the point of comfort, is also the thing that gets it into trouble in the final ten minutes.

At seventy-five minutes, it is still a tight film that keeps the tension high and earns most of its ambition. The structural risks it takes are real risks, not aesthetic posturing. And the film it is in conversation with, the long tradition of found footage as emotional exposure, is richer for having this in it.

Movie Reviews

The Serpent’s Skin Is Everything We’ve Been Asking Queer Horror For

Published

3 weeks ago

March 25, 2026

Luna Gray

We need to talk about Alexandra McVicker.

I came into The Serpent’s Skin ready to watch Alice Maio Mackay do her thing. And she does, we’ll get there. But McVicker as Anna stopped me cold within the first ten minutes and didn’t let go. She’s playing timid in a way I haven’t seen done right in a long time. There’s this quality to her where you can feel how carefully she’s holding herself, like she’s protecting something she knows is fragile but real, and every time the camera goes in close you catch it. Mackay leans into those close-ups hard, Obsession-style. The kind of framing where a face becomes its own landscape, and McVicker rewards it every single time. The hope sitting underneath all that timidity is quiet enough that you might miss it if you’re not paying attention. Don’t miss it. It’s the whole movie.

Okay. Mackay. Six features, twenty-one years old, and The Serpent’s Skin is where she lands on the version of herself she’s been moving toward since So Vam. The trans experience isn’t the plot here so much as it’s the weather. It’s in how Anna walks into rooms, in what she’s leaving behind before we even meet her, in what the stakes actually are when the supernatural stuff kicks in. You don’t get a monologue explaining any of it. If you live inside it, you’ll feel the whole shape. If you don’t, you’ll still have a good time, which is the harder trick and the one she pulls off. Her trajectory across these films has been toward exactly this. Trans characters moved from background to center, and now center to core. The Serpent’s Skin is where that project feels complete.

There’s a scene with Danny, where he hits on Anna, and the sexual tension in that scene seeps through the screen in a way that I was not expecting from a Tuesday afternoon screener. The chemistry is real, and it’s uncomfortable, and it’s good. And then Danny transforms, and the makeup team gave him something right out of the Buffyverse practical effects playbook. That same textured ridge work, monsters that feel like they share actual air with the people they’re threatening. The whole sequence recontextualizes everything that came before it. It’s a good piece of filmmaking. The setup earns the scare.

One note, offered with love: there is an intimate scene where someone spits on their hand. I understand the intention. A woman this competent in every other area of her life would carry lube. She should carry lube. This is my only complaint about The Serpent’s Skin and I recognize how good that is.

The whole visual world is neon-soaked in a way that feels deliberate at every level rather than just aesthetic. Every color is a reference or a warning. The festival circuit noticed. They were right.

Here’s what I can’t stop thinking about, though. The Serpent’s Skin is a very good movie that is also, structurally, a pilot. The mythology has room in it. Anna and Gen and the world they’re building has room in it. I want eight seasons of twenty-two episodes. I want monster of the week. I want to watch this relationship grow across years in the same way we got to watch the Winchesters figure their lives out, except this time nobody’s queerness is subtext, nobody’s trans identity is a twist, and the story belongs to them from the start. Give us that show. Someone give us that show now.

But until then we have this, and this is worth your time and your money and the drive to wherever it’s playing near you. Horror has been asking for a film that centers queer women without making the queerness the tragedy, that uses the supernatural as something other than a metaphor for shame, that trusts its audience enough to just tell the story and let us feel it. The Serpent’s Skin is that film. Alice Maio Mackay made it at twenty-one. We should probably all be embarrassed about that, in the best possible way.

Where to see it:

Now playing New York, NY — March 27 | Los Angeles, CA — April 3

Upcoming screenings

4/10, 4/11 — Denver, CO — Sie FilmCenter
4/11 — Boston, MA — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Boston Seaport
4/11 — Chicago, IL — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Wrigleyville
4/11 — Dallas, TX — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Cedars
4/11 — Denton, TX — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Denton
4/11 — New York, NY — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan
4/11 — Yonkers, NY — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Yonkers
4/11 — Raleigh, NC — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Raleigh
4/11 — San Antonio, TX — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Park North
4/11 — San Francisco, CA — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema New Mission
4/11 — Santa Clara, CA — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Valley Fair
4/11 — Woodbury, MN — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Woodbury
4/11 — Naples, FL — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Naples
4/11, 4/13 — Denver, CO — Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Sloans Lake
4/11, 4/14 — Austin, TX — Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar
4/25 — Sacramento, CA — The Dreamland Cinema
5/14 — Sebastopol, CA — Rialto Cinema
6/8 — Portland, OR — Clinton Street Theater

Movie Reviews

[Review] ‘The Kinderhook Creature: In The Shadow of Sasquatch’ – A Haunting Mystery

Published

4 weeks ago

March 22, 2026

Ryan T. Cusick

Director Seth Breedlove continues his exploration of American folklore with The Kinderhook Creature: In the Shadow of Sasquatch, a quietly unsettling and reflective documentary that blends eyewitness testimony with deeply personal storytelling. Known for his work with Small Town Monsters, Breedlove once again leans into atmosphere over spectacle, delivering a film that feels as much like a character study as it does an investigation into the unknown.

Set in the quiet town of Kinderhook, New York, the film centers on author and radio broadcaster Bruce Hallenbeck, whose alleged encounters with a mysterious upright creature in the 1980s helped shape the legend of the so-called Kinderhook Creature. Rather than presenting the story as a straightforward cryptid hunt, the documentary frames these events through Hallenbeck’s life and experiences, creating a narrative that is both intimate and quietly unnerving.

Breedlove’s approach favors mood and reflection, allowing the weight of the story to build through interviews, recollections, and the enduring impact these encounters have had on those involved. The film also touches on broader paranormal elements, suggesting that the creature sightings may be only one part of a much larger and stranger series of events.

What sets In the Shadow of Sasquatch apart is its restraint. It avoids sensationalism, instead focusing on the human side of belief, memory, and mystery. For longtime followers of Small Town Monsters, the film fits comfortably alongside previous entries like The Mothman of Point Pleasant and On the Trail of Bigfoot, continuing the studio’s signature blend of folklore and grounded storytelling.

While viewers looking for definitive answers may not find them here, the documentary succeeds in presenting a compelling and thoughtful look at a decades-old mystery that still lingers.

The Kinderhook Creature: In the Shadow of Sasquatch arrives on digital platforms March 24, offering a quietly haunting entry that lingers long after the credits roll.