“When we ran out of films, Rob told me he wanted to prank our friends. 'In early lockdown in the UK last year, I started a WhatsApp group that was a quarantine movie club, and invited all my filmmaker friends – actors, producers, stunt guys – so we could watch films on Netflix together,' says Shepherd. 'You've got 12 weeks.' ‘We were just making a film for our friends, with our friends’ 'Now go away and make it,' the company said. Or, as the New York Times puts it, a horror that 'speaks to our moment of uncertainty'.

In this instance, the creeping sense of impending doom the pandemic had unleashed across the globe. Shepherd and his co-writers, Savage and Gemma Hurley, got together – over Zoom calls, of course, because London was deep into a tier 3 lockdown then – to craft a nerve-twangingly terrifying jump-fest that, while owing plenty to 1999's genre-subverting The Blair Witch Project, also managed to perfectly capture the modern zeitgeist. US streaming service Shudder not only greenlit the project and put up the cash, but also said: 'You've got two weeks to put a script together.' By the time he woke up, his two-word idea – 'Zoom seance' – was pitched by Savage to some of the biggest horror production studios in the world.

Shudder zoom movie