Cinema In The Digital Age Week 8: Digital Gothic and the Technological Uncanny
This week we watched ‘Host’ (Savage, 2020, UK) which is a desktop horror film and to quote Kevin B. Lee, the film not only utilises a zoom call as the film’s “camera lens” but as the film’s “canvas” too. Unlike other desktop horror films, where its just a group of friends on a group call for no reason, this film uses the real life COVID 19 situation to justify the films use of zoom and screen capture technology.
I understand why director Robert Savage would create a film like this as he is using the pandemic as an advantage to create a horror film in a safe but creative way in the current situation. However, the pandemic has taken such a toll on everyone’s life that who would actually want to watch a film about the current pandemic? At the moment, people I know and myself want escapism. I don’t want to watch a film that depicts what my life currently looks like.
So the film isn’t great to watch now.
So will it be good to watch in the future?
I don’t think so.
The problem with technology or texts that centre around technology is that technology is always changing and evolves so quickly. Meaning that in a few years, watching a whole film that focuses on a zoom call is going to feel so dated. Yeah we all love zoom now but remember when everyone used Skype? Now when I see Skype in ‘Unfriended’ ((Levan Gabriadze, USA/Russia, 2014), the film feels ancient and it only came out 7 years ago.
Plus audiences in 20 or so years aren’t going to understand the context of a desktop horror set in 2020 as much as the people who lived through it. They won’t connect to the characters as much.
So this film has a very small time of relevancy before it gets forgotten.