This article uses the 2020 desktop horror film Host, which was made and released entirely under lockdown conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic, and shot using the computer screen interface of a Zoom call, as a case study through which to examine the film industry’s increasing dependency on digital technologies. It first situates the film within the broader context of sustainable filmmaking initiatives, emphasizing the carbon footprint of digital streaming platforms to complicate the assumption that such technologies are immaterial. It then considers the capacity for the film and its reflexive deployment of the computer interface to provoke an awareness of its own materiality, with a focus on the ways in which it dramatizes the failure of videoconferencing software to meaningfully replace “authentic” communication, rendering it threatening and uncanny in the process. The article ends by considering how the film’s transparent displaying of its labour and construction still keeps invisible the exploitative and racialized labour of digital device construction—without which it would not exist—ultimately arguing that film studies would benefit from a continued occupation with materiality.
