Director Aneesh Chaganty masterfully used the many, many ways we use technology to depict this story of a man searching for his missing daughter, and Cho's performance grounds the film emotionally. Both are available on HBO/HBO Max (and on other digital platforms to rent).īut it was 2018's 'Searching,' starring John Cho, that seemed to be the moment when the screen thriller crawled out of the depths of low-budget horror gimmickry and into more prestigious territory, thanks to the star power of Cho. There is no doubt an 'Unfriended: COVID-19' is in the works, so catch up with the first two, which deliver the scares aplenty. 'Unfriended' took on the issue of cyberbullying, featuring the ghost of a deceased victim haunting a group video chat, while 'Dark Web' probed the depths of the more sinister corners of the internet for horror. The breakthrough films in the genre were definitely 2014's 'Unfriended,' directed by Levan Gabriadze, and the way-better-than-it-had-to-be 2018 sequel 'Unfriended: Dark Web,' directed by horror writer Stephen Susco. It's genuinely scary, eliciting many jumps and screams as the haunting escalates. There's even some excellent gags and scares with the Snapchat add-on filters and the digital background feature. The film was shot and edited from conception to release during the shutdown and makes ingenious use of the Zoom features we have come to know all too well: the waiting room, the dropped calls, watching your friend carry around their laptop or their phone topple off a table. A group of friends convene for a Zoom seance, and soon, incredibly spooky and terrifying things start to happen in each of their spaces, the danger only magnified by their isolation.

'Host,' directed by British filmmaker Rob Savage, takes place entirely on Zoom, the video-conferencing application that has taken over our lives since the COVID-19 shutdown in March.

This week, the most popular movie on the film social networking site Letterboxd is a 57-minute horror film called 'Host,' available to stream on the horror-specific streaming service Shudder (take it for a spin with a weeklong free trial).

Zoom seance movie