To mark the film’s one-year anniversary, STARBURST caught up with the lead actor of 2020’s most revolutionary horror film…
If you’d told Haley Bishop at the beginning of 2020 that there’d be a global pandemic which would shut down nearly the entire world, that she’d end up making a movie entirely over a computer with some of her best friends, and that that movie would go onto be one of the most critically lauded of the year, she’d probably have laughed in your face. And yet, that’s exactly what happened.
Released on Shudder last summer, Rob Savage’s Host tells the story of a group of friends (led by Haley, with all actors playing fictionalised versions of themselves) stuck in lockdown who hold a séance over Zoom instead of their usual quizzes. But things quickly go awry when the spirit the group invites into their meeting turns out to be malignant, and starts picking off the group one by one…
When Haley speaks to STARBURST in early June, it thankfully isn’t over Zoom. She’s taken some time out of her busy filming schedule to speak to us over the phone, and is only too happy to spill all her insider info about Host.
A natural chemistry
One year on from the film’s release, Haley remains “very proud” of the work done on Host. “I wasn’t a massive horror fan before shooting Host,” she says, “because I get scared very easily, and just watching it, it’s still scary to me.” She certainly isn’t alone: earlier this year Host made our list of ‘Ten Essential Shudder Originals & Exclusives’ because of how terrifying it is, and it’s one of only a handful of genre movies to have been given a stunning Blu-ray release by Second Sight. We honestly can’t give it enough praise – but what was it like to make a whole film entirely over Zoom?
“So strange!” Haley admits. “We were lucky in the sense that I’ve known Rob Savage for about six years now since we did [the short film] Dawn of the Deaf, and so there’s a nice shorthand there. So that was interesting, because it is weird, not having somebody there in the space to come and have a chat and whatnot. But then [again], being on Zoom, for [Rob] as a director, opened up all these possibilities, because we would run long takes as we were filming. And because we were on Zoom, we could use the chat function where Rob could then send us little messages, or lines to say, or notes as we were going along. And because there are quite a few of us on the screen at one time, it was okay for us to … take a second, read what he had written to us, and then implement the note or the lines.”
So how did that impact the way Host was filmed day-to-day? “It actually made us do really long takes because he couldn’t direct us without actually having to stop what we were doing: when you do the scene [virtually], you just kind of do everything simultaneously. It wasn’t as hard as we all thought it was going to be. Like I said, our own personal relationship and shorthand we have with him were really helpful.”
That shorthand, Haley feels, was an essential factor in both aiding the shoot and making the film as good as it could possibly be. “I definitely don’t think Host would have been made, and turned out as well as it did, had there not been the friendship between everybody involved,” she says – and she means everybody. The five main women of the film are all friends in real life, and have all worked with Rob before; the group have also known producers Jed Sheperd and Douglas Cox for years, and even VFX supervisor Steven Bray is a friend.
This is something that “made the whole process really collaborative, because we all trust each other as artists,” which “gave us real freedom to play.” This was especially useful in selling to the audience the idea of a group of friends who care about each other in such a short space of time (the film clocks in at a tight 56 minutes). “The friendships,” Haley says, “would have been a lot more of a struggle had we not just been used to improvising and messing around with each other for the years leading up [to Host].”
Haley isn’t the only one who feels this way: her co-stars absolutely agree with her. Speaking to Second Sight for the aforementioned Blu-ray, Emma Webb, Radina Drandova and Caroline Ward all feel that getting to work with a group of friends was one of the most exciting aspects of making the film, and Edward Linard (who was the only member of the core cast not to be part of that pre-existing friendship group) notes that “it was fun to just bounce off each other and roll with it, and I think it shows throughout the film – the chemistry and the conversations all feel so natural.”
Where we’re going, we don’t need … scripts
These pre-existing relationships also allowed for a lot of improvisation during filming – something that worked hugely in the cast’s favour, as they didn’t have a script: only an outline of each act. As Haley explains, “Jed and Rob and Gemma [Hurley, co-writer] wrote a beautiful treatment for us that said, ‘Okay, your character starts at point A, and then by the end of the scene, they’re at point B.’”
This meant that basically every line of dialogue in the movie is some level of improv: Edward notes that Rob would give the group notes in-between takes to dial up certain aspects of conversation or emotions, which resulted in the girls mercilessly laying into Jinny (Teddy’s on-screen girlfriend) prior to her appearance in the film, but while she was still present on the Zoom call. Thankfully, everything was taken in good spirits (pun intended).
Those good spirits were certainly needed on set, as it turns out none of the cast were aware of the specifics of anyone else’s death. Haley explains this was a deliberate move on Rob’s part, as he “redacted all the deaths in the treatment … so we could all have more authentic reactions to them when they happened.” Yikes – if you thought it was scary watching all those deaths play out in the final film, just imagine what it was like being there to shoot them!
Strangely enough, Haley agrees with STARBURST about which deaths we found the scariest: Caroline’s demise she describes as “terrible,” because “she’s so sweet and lovely,” while the deaths of Radina and her boyfriend Alan are the most shocking, she feels. “When Alan drops from the ceiling,” she says, “that throws me every time. I’m always like, ‘I know it’s coming!’ but it’s just such a shock.” Caroline, if you remember, disappears for a little while so only her virtual background is visible, before her bloody face is repeatedly slammed into her laptop in the film’s most brutal and visceral scare (Caroline also says that flinging herself at her laptop repeatedly was “the most exercise I’ve done in months!”). Radina, meanwhile, is searching for Alan, who’s gone missing, only to find him when he drops from the ceiling right behind her with a clatter, and the demon that’s haunting the group hunts Radina down before she can escape her flat.
Speaking of stunts, all the stuntwork in Host was planned out in the reverse order to a usual film, due to the Covid situation. Rob and co worked closely with Lucky 13 Action to figure out what stunts were actually possible, and then wrote the story and deaths around what they could physically do. When filming Alan and Radina’s death scene, this resulted in Lucky 13’s Nathaniel Marten being hung from the ceiling for an increasingly long period of time as the dialogue before the drop became longer and longer.
Watching the final film, you’d have no idea how much VFX work went into it: according to Haley there are 65 different VFX shots scattered throughout the movie, which VFX supervisor Steve Bray says is down to there being more stunts than usual in a film of this sort. Much of his team’s work, he says, was removing rigging and wires from the background, in order to “make the shots feel more organic.”
In need of a friend
That the film feels so organic is said by many, including us here at STARBURST, to be one of its greatest strengths – and all involved are quick to agree. Producer Jed Sheperd feels that the best part of the film is the core performances, while Rob is quick to admit that “this project wouldn’t have been able to happen if we couldn’t have put that much trust in the actors.”
Haley modestly agrees, but also feels there’s an element of relatability that really sells the core cast as friends. “These girls were doing all the same things that everyone else was doing,” she explains, “so you find that, even though we don’t get a ton of backstory and find out a lot about them, individually, they’re very relatable characters.” She also points out that the usual criticism levelled at found-footage movies (the age-old ‘why are they still filming this?’) doesn’t really apply to Host.
“That’s the only way we’ve been communicating with anybody – what are they gonna do, run out to an empty, scary street?” she laughs. “I think there’s this believability that they would have stayed on Zoom with each other and tried to help and stay connected, because that’s the only way the world was staying connected at the time, and I think that resonated a lot with fans.”
Given how isolated everyone is throughout the movie, one of the film’s strangest moments comes not from a demonic scare, but from seeing more than one person on-screen at once. When Jemma hikes it over to Haley’s flat at the end of the movie (a real-world possibility, as the two live very close to each other), it’s the only time we see anyone from the group interact in person – an odd experience both for the audience and the actors.
Haley explains that it was “very weird seeing each other for the first time after … almost two months since we’d seen any friends. And it was even weirder, because it was at a time when you just couldn’t hug anybody, [so] we had to be really careful with Covid and be masked up and stay six feet apart.” Though social distancing rules meant the two couldn’t “goof off” together like they would on a normal set, it was still nice for each of them to see a friend – even if Haley had to rip her kitchen apart with fishing wire to do so.
Host 2: Electric Boogaloo?
Speaking of the film’s final scene, Haley has a theory behind the ending – and even an idea for a possible sequel. She notes that we never actually see Haley or Jemma die like we do the other characters, because the Zoom meeting cuts out right as the demon jumps at the pair. Here at STARBURST, we’d taken that to mean the demon had killed them – but Haley has a much better idea.
“I like to think that we were somehow able to fight off the demon, or we wake up and don’t know what happened, but somehow we’ve survived,” she explains with a tangible excitement. “Then maybe we can go on living our lives, and all of a sudden we’re starting to be haunted again in another way, and we have to refight the demon eventually. I hope that Jemma and I go on to live long, prosperous lives,” she laughs.
So is Host 2: Cruise Control on the cards then? Not anytime soon, sadly: the success of the first film has meant that Rob Savage is now a very busy man. He’s currently in the middle of a three-picture deal with Blumhouse (the excellent minds behind the likes of Get Out, The Invisible Man, and the latest slew of Halloween films), and he also has projects in the works with StudioCanal and genre legend Sam Raimi.
Even so, Haley is keen for a sequel at some point in the future. “I hope we do [it] eventually,” she tells us, “just because I’m curious [to see] what happens to my character, but I think it might be another year or so before that’s even a possibility with [Rob’s] schedule.” There’s also the issue of the ongoing easing (or total lack of) Covid-19 restrictions in the UK – will audiences want to watch another film set on Zoom during a pandemic when they’re all back out in the real world? Haley isn’t too sure.
It’s hard to strike that balance, she explains: “Do [audiences] really want to watch a sequel that’s on a Zoom screen again? [Or] are we now all thirsty for proper films [with] props and costumes, and, you know, the creating of the world?” Still, Haley is never one to say never – and given how huge the original was, we can’t imagine Shudder would say no to a follow-up a year or two down the road.
From hosts to ghosts
In the more immediate future is the gang’s next project: a live-action videogame by the name of Ghosts. Though not part of the “Host Cinematic Universe” (as Haley puts it), the Host girls are reuniting with Jed Sheperd for the horror game that sees them playing what Haley describes as “little ghost hunters” in a haunted house facing off against an entity known as the Long Lady.
Due for release on consoles in February next year, it’s something of a gamble for the team: the idea of a live-action videogame was popular in the 1990s but has dropped off since, and current rumour has it that the game will only be playable at certain times during the night. This doesn’t bother Haley, though: perhaps with the success of Host, there’s evidence of an appetite among horror fans for movies and games that do things differently.
“It’s exciting,” she says, and “should be another new way of building something – we just like to keep reinventing the wheel, I guess!” You can say that again, Haley.
HOST is available now on Shudder and Blu-ray, while GHOSTS is scheduled for release in February 2022
