10 Terrifying Low Budget Horror Movies

Host is a film that started off as a joke. Director Rob Savage initially made a five-minute video where he was actually on a Zoom call with some of his friends, said that he could hear sounds in his attic, and then investigated his set-up scare.

It didn’t take long for this video to go viral – you’ve probably seen it without realising what it was – and for Savage to turn his concept into a longer piece of media. It’s not quite feature-length, but there’s no fat on this beast, and Host is a delightful 57 minutes of all killer, no filler.

On the face of things, it seems like a film you’ve seen a hundred times before, with a few twists that you may have only seen a handful of times before, and you wouldn’t be blamed for writing it off as another found-footage style flick with cheap effects and even cheaper scares. No, you wouldn’t be blamed, but you would probably have to apologise to yourself.

Host is so very clever with what it does, but not in a showy way, more in a way that gives you reasons for what you’re seeing. A big complaint levelled at found footage flicks is that there is very little reason for someone to be running around with a camera when a gigantic monster is tearing up New York City. Here, however, it all makes sense.

The folks here are all friends who can’t get together for, well, reasons, and they decide to have a catch-up on Zoom. Instantly, there is not only a reason for this whole thing to be recorded, but also a reason for the characters to walk around with their cameras when they feel like getting up.

Host makes the unbelievable believable, it makes the cheap charming, and it makes a face-swap filter just about the most original scare in a decade.