Desktop horror : séance and surveillance in Rob Savage’s Host

This thesis examines a novel trend in cinema called “desktop cinema,” which emerged in the early 2000’s but only became mainstream form the mid-2010’s. Desktop cinema is not a genre, but a form of filmmaking defined by the way they are created: via screen-recording. Desktop cinema takes place on a computer screen, and is filmed by the computer screen. While small amounts of writing have been done on desktop cinema as a trend as well as on specific works of desktop cinema, this research has usually been done within the context of a larger framework of study such as post-cinema or found-footage horror. Desktop cinema has not been treated as a form worthy of serious academic examination in its own right. This thesis attempts to fill that gap by looking closely at desktop cinema: what it is, how it is made and how it changes cinema to adapt to its technological constraints. This thesis focuses on one desktop film: Rob Savage’s Host (2020) which was filmed during the height of lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic. Host was created remotely over Zoom, which also serves as the film’s setting. The two chapters of this thesis examine how Host transforms the desktop into cinema. I employ a textual analysis of the film as well as an analysis of the technology utilized within the film. The first chapter focuses on the role of Zoom in Host: how Host transforms Zoom’s visual language into cinematic language, and how, ultimately, Zoom’s split-screen layout gestures towards anxieties surrounding surveillance. The second chapter focuses on Host’s unique relationship to genre, specifically the genre techno-horror genre. I position Host within the lineage of Spiritualism, séance in cinema, and Japanese techno-horror. I argue that Host, while including this history, also incorporates contemporary fears about synthetic media and the Covid-19 pandemic into its landscape of horror. Ultimately, this thesis utilizes the formal and thematic richness of Host to prove its main objective: to show that desktop cinema is a form of filmmaking worthy of academic and critical scrutiny.