The year 2020 was a particularly tough one for the movie industry. With the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe, cinemas everywhere spent months either closed or open with a limited capacity. Additionally, with travel restrictions and social distancing measures in place, film productions had no option but to halt. This meant that very few projects actually managed to get made last year, but there were a few filmmakers that thought outside of the norm and succeeded in getting one made. The most famous of those is Rob Savage’s Host, a brilliant British horror film that saw a group of friends conduct a seance over Zoom with disastrous results. Not wishing to be outdone, American filmmaker Nick Simon followed a similar filming process, the result – new horror meta-comedy, Untitled Horror Movie.
Starring very familiar faces from popular TV shows – Shadowhunters, The Originals, 13 Reasons Why, Never Have I Ever, and The Umbrella Academy – Untitled Horror Movie is a very entertaining watch. The plot involves a group of actors, all working on the same television series as they discover that their show is about to be cancelled. With all of them panicking about life after cancellation, they decide to make a horror film by themselves, the hope being that it’ll generate enough buzz to keep their programme on air for longer, or that it will make them all super famous. During a brain-storming session they inadvertently summon forth a real demon and soon find themselves the victims of a rather sinister game.
As with Host, Untitled Horror Movie was created almost entirely within the digital arena. With Covid restrictions this meant that each cast member was responsible for shooting their own scenes, doing their own hair and make-up, and even attempting a stunt or two in their own home. Filming in such a way creates a much more interactive experience for the actor and their investment, and belief in the project shines through in their commitment. For a film constructed remotely using minimal equipment, Untitled Horror Movie has a pretty high standard of production values, it looks far more slick and glossy than even Blumhouse’s Unfriended, which clearly had a bigger crew and budget.
Fans of the cast will have a lot of fun with Untitled Horror Movie, each playing against their own reputations and playing alt-world versions of themselves in an Extras kind of way. Each sends themselves up beautifully and it’s clear to see that there are no egos here, Katherine McNamara is especially excellent as hippie-dippie Chrissy. There are also lots of nods to the real actors’ prior bodies of work, Claire Holt’s time on 47 Metres Down being a recurring anecdote is just one such example. Fans can also enjoy a sneaky peek into the houses of the cast.
The narrative itself is fairly contrived, but the meta aspect of the film allows this to be the case without detracting from the enjoyment. The actors know that they are making a generic found footage horror movie, and whilst they try and add the occasional spin on tropes, are quite content in knowing that studios like films that they can easily recognise. These cheeky nods to the industry’s need to churn out more of the same are what helps elevate it from being just another Unfriended or an American take on Host, adding in a nice veil of Scream-level self-referential intertextuality. In a further bid to set itself apart from other films told entirely via phones and computers, Untitled Horror Movie expands itself out of the real-time live-stream constraints of its peers and instead tells its story over the course of a few days/weeks. The exact elapsing of time is a little unclear, which does make things a little confusing, but never so much that the viewer is lost. By stretching the story out across a longer span of time you have the opportunity to get to know the characters better and there’s less need for clunky exposition to cram everything into just one Google hangout or the like. There’s also a greater window of time to build the horror aspects into the piece, and this time is utilised well.
Though not quite as creative as Host, Untitled Horror Movie remains another shining example of the ingenuity of creatives during the pandemic era of filmmaking. A very watchable and entertaining low budget horror comedy that plays as Unfriended meets Host by way of Scream.
Untitled Horror Movie is available on Digital HD on 15th June 2021.
Untitled Horror Movie
Summary
A pandemic-era film that is certain to please the cast’s legions of fans, Untitled Horror Movie is cleverly thought-through and wickedly entertaining.
