Importantly, the character Emma is seen using face filters on herself throughout the beginning of the film. Finally, the digital world has given a face to the malevolent presence - something as silly as a face filter has made the demonic tangible. This is more than a temporary malfunction. While it seems to be a glitch, as Emma reaches out to “touch” it, it suddenly moves to look at her. With the first-person perspective, we embody Emma’s experience of wanting to investigate but also being terrified of what may be waiting under that virtual mask. Without it, she would have no idea something was there. This is not a quick glimpse of the filter, but a slow, agonizing moment as Emma ( Emma Louise Webb) slowly walks towards it using her webcam as a guide. In the frame is just a face filter floating in the air. There is one moment that truly captures the horrors of Host. Host takes something that we use for comfort and weaponizes it. Something evil is able to travel through the Internet and terrorize each participant, turning one of the few avenues of connection right now into an object of terror. Host was also filmed entirely through Zoom and follows six friends who come together from their respective apartments to drink wine, chat, and, most importantly, conduct a seance.īut as twenty-somethings are wont to do, most of them don’t take the ceremony seriously, which unleashes deadly consequences. The film takes place entirely on Zoom, a piece of software that we have all become increasingly familiar with in the past few months.
But that small screen is merely a vessel for an endless world of horrifying possibilities.Ī shining example of those possibilities is seen in Rob Savage’s Host. Films such as Unfriended, Megan is Missing, and The Den venture into the digital world, confining their stories to the screen of a laptop upon which viewers are given a glimpse of unfolding terrors. With the advent of the Internet, live streaming, Snapchat, and video chatting platforms, the found footage subgenre has now evolved to be more than just shaky handheld cameras - and more than just found footage.
As our obsession with filming the world around us grows, so do the potential avenues for found footage horror. In Afflicted, vlogging is used to document and upload the realtime transformation of a man into a vampire. In JeruZalem, apocalyptic horrors are captured via Google Glass. With the Paranormal Activity franchise, surveillance cameras and static frames became a way to capture the supernatural. Found footage horror is a subgenre that, through the first-person perspective, has been able to articulate our complex and ever-changing relationship with technology.
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