X

In his first film since 2016’s In a Val­ley of Vio­lence, and his first hor­ror pic­ture in almost a decade (the last one being the cult-based hor­ror The Sacra­ment), Ti West brings it back to basics: sex, blood and cinema.

X is a film of extreme encoun­ters, in every sense. Set in 1979, a makeshift fam­i­ly of porn per­form­ers make their way to a remote farm­house in deep Texas which they’ve rent­ed to serve as the set­ting of the porno they’re shoot­ing, ​‘The Farmer’s Daugh­ter’. The rag-tag group is led by their sleazy exec pro­duc­er Wayne (Mar­tin Hen­der­son), who has hired a cre­ative­ly ambi­tious direc­tor RJ (Owen Camp­bell) and his shy sound recordist girl­friend Lor­raine (Jen­ny Orte­ga) to shoot a gen­uine­ly ​“good dirty movie”.

Wayne intends to make bank, inspired by the suc­cess of ​’70s leg­endary porn pic­ture Deb­bie Does Dal­las, and his girl­friend Max­ine (Mia Goth) intends to become a star. They’re joined by Viet­nam vet Jack­son (Scott ​“Kid Cudi” Mes­cu­di) loves his porn job and Bob­by-Lynne (Brit­tany Snow), who just wants to buy a house with a pool so she can sun­bathe her tal­ents. Once the on-cam­era sex is over, they’re a whole­some bunch, eat­ing sand­wich­es and singing Fleet­wood Mac songs a capella.

As soon as they pull into the farm­house, though, they get on the nerves of the creepy own­ers, an elder­ly cou­ple, Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl (Mia Goth, pulling dou­ble duty), who are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly repulsed by and attract­ed to the horny bohemi­ans. The ten­sion between the two groups esca­lates into a grue­some and grimy final thir­ty min­utes of stab­bing, impal­ing and alli­ga­tor chomping.

The premise is sim­ple: hot young things get­ting slaugh­tered in a creaky old house. And that’s enough. X shares the DNA of Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre more than the recent sequel does. In his intro­duc­tion to A24’s newslet­ter on the film, he wrote about his respect for both porn and hor­ror film­mak­ing, ​“two forms of low­brow enter­tain­ment that could be made inde­pen­dent­ly out­side of the tra­di­tion­al Hol­ly­wood stu­dio sys­tem.” The slash­ers of the sev­en­ties cre­at­ed a visu­al lan­guage that we’re still emu­lat­ing today, using the lim­i­ta­tions of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing as a spring­board for their creativity.

West doesn’t just ape the style of inde­pen­dent 70s film­mak­ing but adds a bit of con­tem­po­rary flavour. The edit­ing here pulls some uncon­ven­tion­al tricks. There are wild jux­ta­po­si­tions and screen wipes and split-screens that pull us out of a sense of false secu­ri­ty slash­ers usu­al­ly lull the audi­ence into. There are qui­et moments of ten­sion that gen­uine­ly make you squirm in antic­i­pa­tion and appre­ci­a­tion for the art­ful fram­ing by West’s reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Elliott Rockett.

The dread is always there, but the vio­lence doesn’t kick in til we’re already invest­ed and com­fort­able with the char­ac­ters. Mia Goth’s dou­ble-duty per­for­mance as the ambi­tious sex star­let Max­ine and the frus­trat­ed old Pearl is intense: she’s dreamy and deter­mined as Max­ine and intense­ly creepy as Pearl, who resents the pret­ty young things that get to mess around when she can’t any­more. Pearl’s make-up, though, leans into the tire­some idea that being old is by default grotesque and scary.

X has no inter­est in mak­ing sweep­ing state­ments about sex­u­al lib­er­a­tion, about pornog­ra­phy or age­ing. It brings the slash­er back to its fleshy basics, lean­ing into what made the grand­dad­dies of slash­er films so mem­o­rable. At the very heart of West’s movie is the essence of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing itself: some­one wants to make art, anoth­er wants to be a star, and every­one else wants to make money.

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