Hosts (2020)

directed by Richard Oakes, Adam Leader

UK

89 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Note: This is an old review that I've dug up from my archives and reworked for quality. I do not have my shit together enough to do a new review again this week.

When winter rolls around and I turn my eyes towards the crop of new holiday horror movies, I do not expect them to be good; if I can get a laugh out of them, that's great, but more likely they're just more slop on the pile and that's that. This is where I was coming from when I started to watch Hosts, and I got completely blindsided by a movie that was genuinely disturbing: a gut-punch in various ways. If this was not set at Christmastime, I would still have thought it was a brilliant movie, but Christmas provides some context for the events of the film that is important in two ways, one of which I'll get into now and one I'll talk about later.

So one of the many things this film is good at is creating characters who you really don't want to see die (and then killing them, of course). It is extremely heavy on the familial love, and some romantic love as well, and if you're particularly jaded about that it could feel cloying, but to me the performances were authentic enough that it didn't bother me how hard the film emphasizes the bonds between its characters. We don't spend a lot of time with the couple who eventually become the antagonists, but they come off like a young couple genuinely in love and then something happens very suddenly that I won't spoil, but that made me realize I was in for something better than the cut-rate holiday slasher with some possibly demonic twists that I expected. If you've seen this, I think you know what scene I'm talking about. I did not expect the possession to look like that. I've never seen possession look like that.

Another interesting thing this movie does is tell us that the things happening here are happening everywhere else too, outside of the scope of the film. Await Further Instructions, a movie I recently rewatched that cemented my opinion on it being one of my favorite horror movies of the past decade, also does this. The hints we see on the news that suggest our characters are only a random couple of victims in something that's turning into a country-wide phenomenon makes everything feel much more hopeless.

There are other elements that are used in the development of the film's villains that make them both interesting and genuinely terrifying, and this is the other thing I mentioned earlier that hinges on this being a Christmas movie. A really common theme in Christmas horror is for the villain or villains to kind of represent an anti-consumerist mindset - maybe it'll be somebody who's traumatized by Santa and fed up with the empty commercialization of the holiday, or maybe it'll be Krampus, who, uprooted from his origins, has become a symbol for those disillusioned with Christianity. But each time, when something like that is used, there's always a sort of wink-nudge to the viewer that we're supposed to, on some metaphorical level, sympathize with the villain - after all, the commercialization of Christmas is bad, and everyone is tired of having Christmas music shoved down our gullets. We're not expected to excuse murder in the name of being tired of Salvation Army bell-ringers, but the sentiment is something we can agree with: aren't you just exhausted by all of this? Aren't you tired of people faking charity and togetherness?

However, what Hosts does is use that basic premise (and this is done extremely artfully, only hinted at, never exposition-dumped on us) to construct a backstory for its villains - but it does not make them sympathetic. The implication that the entities that possess the first couple were/are something that existed pre-Christianity, and that they were duped into thinking there would be a place for them within Christianity, only to be driven out and painted as sacrilegious, is something that, in this case, is not presented as a sympathetic backstory. In this case, it makes them bitter, enraged, and vengeful. It's not funny and ironic when they return, fueled by hatred for the Christian holidays that subsumed their own worship; it's terrifying, because their power is coupled with an intense desire for revenge that's as illogical and self-absorbed as the fae, gods, and various other entities of old always are. And humans always end up at their mercy.

It's a latecomer, but this is definitely high up on my favorites list of the year. I would happily (well, maybe that's not the right word, as it is quite brutal and violent) watch this any time, not just around the holidays. There is something to be said about real-life stigmatization of pagan worship and the way this movie plays into the idea that it's a negative, dangerous thing, but... that's a whole other discussion.