After how much I got into Host, my favourite film of 2020, my introduction to Shudder’s collection of streamed horror, and something I think will go down as one of the definitive films of the COVID era, I’ve been waiting for the chance to see what Rob Savage would come up with next. I spent quite a bit of 2021 hoping that this film would get a release over here in some capacity, to no avail, but it finally got a digital release in June of this year. It’s another computer-screen horror film, still working off of DIY production values, but it’s also a sharp change-up from what he offered up last time.
One of the main things that stuck out to me about Host was how likeable and personable the characters were. Dashcam… doesn’t have that. Instead, it has Annie Hardy playing a fictionalised version of herself, a livestreamer who runs into some… interesting situations while travelling in the UK. Hardy (as shown on-screen, since I don’t know anything about her outside of it) is basically the culmination of just about every try-hard edgelord ‘triggering the libtards’ social media personality out there, and even in a genre that regularly features abrasive main characters, she is out there.
She’s a lot to deal with, especially as the face of the film essentially… but she kinda grew on me. Don’t get me wrong, she gave me a lot of uncomfortable flashbacks to when I used to hang out in right-wing online communities and the kind of shit I’d regularly hear around them, but she never managed to cross that line from ‘unlikeable’ to ‘unwatchable’. Maybe it’s because what she’s saying throughout is so damn crazed and bizarre, and she never switches off even when things start getting genre-weird, that I eventually found myself just laughing at so much of her antics.
And in that
way, I think I get what Rob Savage and co. were aiming for with this. I
mean, when dealing with personalities like this, the communities they create,
and the general vibes and ideas that circulate in them, ‘horrorshow’ is one of
the first descriptors that come to mind for me. There’s also how this sensation of
hatewatching is basically the way that camp aesthetics have translated into the
social media age, where generally left-leaning people will watch shit like
InfoWars or scroll through conspiracy hubs like GodlikeProductions forums for a
knowing laugh at people who believe the darnedest things. Considering Host's analogy for COVID and what ultimately doomed the characters in that film, this feels like a deliberate choice.
It helps that the presentation mock-up for the livestream is very convincing. It loses a few points for being clearly edited, which cuts into the immersion (again, compared to the real-time pacing of Host), but everything else fits. I watched this as a YouTube rental, and I honestly think that’s the ideal way to view this, as everything from the use of phone cameras to the outlay for the in-universe streaming site, right down to the chat log, all feel like they’ve been pulled from actual streams I’ve been in. Just for a taste of the detail put into this, someone posts a link in-chat for screengrabs of the stream during a particularly shaky-cam moment… and the link actually works when you type it out. Credit where it’s due.
As for the horror side of things, it benefits from all the homespun effects work that made Host work so damn well. It’s structured like a Halloween funhouse, with Hardy and her ‘best friend’ Stretch (Amar Chadha-Patel) going from one intense and body fluid-splattered set piece to another. It can get a little repetitive with how many times Hardy and/or Stretch will crash their car in the space of just a little over an hour, but as they slowly uncover what appears to be some kind of zombie demonic possession mixed with a suicide cult (I think?), things get pretty damn tense. That aforementioned mood I entered where I was just laughing at how fucking ridiculous the things Hardy were saying are eventually gave way to me actually getting anxious about what would show up next. I’ll even admit that quite a few of the jumpscares in this got me.
With how often I’ve railed against horror movie leads that have been made as artificially hateful as possible for cheap audience catharsis, I’m rather surprised that I liked this as much as I did. The production values and pacing show that Rob Savage and co. are still going strong with their approach to found-footage filmmaking, the livestream is almost annoyingly realistic, and for as irritating as Annie Hardy can be in this, I still came out of this kinda-sorta liking her schtick. Seeing her do a freestyle rap over the end credits by using the names of the production crew was pretty cool, and while I can’t guarantee that I’ll be checking out her actual livestreams after this (again, bad memories about being around those kinds of communities), I’ll say that she worked quite well in this context.
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