A ​’70s porn shoot takes a bloody turn in the trail­er for Ti West’s X

It’s a clas­sic hor­ror set­up: a group of attrac­tive young peo­ple hun­ker down for a night out in the sticks, only to be picked off by some home­spun abom­i­na­tion prowl­ing the grounds. This sub­genre ori­ent­ed around rur­al-themed ter­ror peaked in the ​’70s with The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre, a gold­en era to which Ti West harkens back twice over with his lat­est film.

His upcom­ing fea­ture X, the trail­er for which appeared online this morn­ing, both evokes and recre­ates the hey­day of the grind­house with an old-fash­ioned slash­er peri­od piece set in the all-too-apro­pos sum­mer of ​’79. The sub­ject mat­ter tack­les the beloved sleaze of the moment’s cin­e­ma head-on as well, fol­low­ing a shoe­string crew that’s set out to pro­duce a porno flick called The Farmer’s Daugh­ter around a coun­try home that will serve as a final rest­ing place for sev­er­al involved parties.

The direc­tor (Mar­tin Hen­der­son), his lead­ing man (Scott Mes­cu­di, rock­ing a tight Afro), his ingénue (Brit­tany Snow), and the rest of the gang (Mia Goth and Jen­na Orte­ga) just want to find some­where cheap and seclud­ed to make their smut in peace, but the own­er of their tem­po­rary lodg­ings has a dark secret. Something’s not right with his des­ic­cat­ed-look­ing old wife, sure­ly set on a demon­ic path from some for­ma­tive trau­ma years ago, pre­sum­ably now sub­sist­ing on the flesh of travelers.

While the film itself has the sharp­ness of some­thing made with present-day tech­nol­o­gy, West indulges his cel­lu­loid fetishism with snatch­es of the movie-with­in-the-movie, com­plete with the fad­ed look and scratch-pop imper­fec­tions syn­ony­mous with ana­log film stock. His nos­tal­gia for the ​’70s comes through in the dead-on cos­tum­ing and hair­styling as well, all in-right-now flared pant legs and feath­ered coiffures.

West has logged some time in the TV world as of late, his last out­ing at the movies being 2016’s exploita­tion-West­ern homage In a Val­ley of Vio­lence. The years have done noth­ing to dim his love for the cheapo B‑movies to which he pays homage here, and if the premise is any indi­ca­tor, the sex-and-gore fac­tor is only going to sky­rock­et. Nice to see some­one still out there, mak­ing his dirty pictures.

X comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 18 March. A date for the UK has yet to be set.