Hostess: Sickly Sweet Horror that Hits the Spot Just Right

Whitney St. Ours’s wordless Hostess invests itself heavily in vibes and leaves the plot up to its audience—and what excellent vibes these are. Following a young woman’s excursion to mitigate the stale ennui of being the combination of young and female and urban, this short horror knows how to immerse your senses in grotesquerie so that you cannot look away from the horrible imagery even as you anticipate worse with all your senses. 

It is a terrible thing to be young and idle and have little money to spend on an apartment nicer than a one room place where life outside the door is a sickeningly constant companion. It heightens the isolation inside. The walls of the unnamed young woman’s (Karlyn Baranowski) insular soft pink world feels as if Sofia Coppola had baked it herself—pun fully intended, as you are about to find. 

Going on an impromptu trip to the corner store just to have somewhere to go, the young woman spots unmanned wares by the streetside. One catches her eye, a little cake in clear plastic with a label that is as obscure as it is simple: Lady Cake’s. She does not pay and leaves as casually as if nothing were amiss. But this is not a story of thievery, so it also does not matter except to emphasise the listlessness of its heroine. 

Here on, the film takes stranger and stranger turns still. Like the cake, you do not know what this is, but you want more before you have finished with the offered serving. The layered, anticipatory, even mischievous soundscape is the true star of the film, the combined triumph of the original score and the sound design. It is what keeps you engrossed in the discomfort the film slathers you in as two characters crowd the woman’s tiny apartment. Power dynamics shift with the slippery dance of a mercury drop on a swaying leaf while Rocky Vega makes the best entrance in her excellent costume as Lady Cake. It falls on Eliot Thompson to be the most unhinged of the lot, power or no power. And Baranowski reaps the rewards of the film’s ability to make baked goods more macabre than actual blood—which does make its appearance, and pales in the nauseating profusion of soft, gooey dessert.

In the end, what remains is that the vibes of Hostess are, in fact, immaculate. The image of the unnamed young woman languidly dangling from a pole in the opening does more to set the mood than merely indicating a probable livelihood. And through the entirety of its 7-minute run, Hostess proves itself an agile gymnast: it builds on its designated feeling with the abandon of a midnight fridge-front binge and the skill of a cat on a fence-top prowl. 

Watch Hostess Horror Short Film Trailer

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