The Texas porn star massacre
There was a stretch of time around the end of the 2000s and the start of the 2010s where Ti West was pretty much the hippest director of English-language horror films. And then, for absolutely no reason I can confidently point to, he simply wasn't there any more. His last horror feature was The Sacrament in 2013, his last feature of any kind was In a Valley of Violence in 2016,and he's spent the intervening years working, not terribly consistently, in television (some of it horror-related).
The eight years West has spent away from the genre have found horror radically transform, and a big part of that transformation has been towards a subgenre we might not unreasonably call "Ti West-style movies". The academics in your life probably call it "elevated horror", the normie horror fans probably call it "fucking boring and pretentious", but either way, it's basically what happens when you combine indie art cinema with witches and monsters and serial killers and whatnot. West didn't exactly invent this most unexpectedly appealing flavor combination, but his 2009 The House of the Devil, which applied the slow shagginess of what we then called "mumblecore" to a slasher-like tale of Satanists, was undoubtedly a watershed moment, and he was attached to some key titles in the years that followed: acting in 2011's You're Next, directing a segment of 2012's V/H/S, and generally just being around. Flash-forward a decade, and most of the people in West's immediate sphere of influence aren't really active in the genre anymore, but the mixture of character study and aesthetic pastiche that West pioneered in The House of the Devil and 2011's The Innkeepers has become a self-perpetuating cottage industry, the financial lifeblood of indie distributor A24, and the only kind of horror film watched by some of the most annoying people on Film Twitter.
This is an awful lot of preamble, but I think it's necessary to get us to West's eighth feature (distributed by the very same A24), with the impeccably simple title X: it's a return to the gimmick of West's greatest success, re-creating in minute detail the visual style and tone of a past incarnation of the horror genre. In this case, the time is 1979 - a year announced in a title card so bombastic that I somewhat wonder if at one point 1979 was the film's intended title - and the style is a few years out-of-date by then, and I don't think that's a complete accident. The film's subjects are a group of people who are certainly chasing a trend that was mostly used up by then, and the feeling that we're watching giddy amateurs get in over their heads is a big part of what makes X tick as a horror movie. But first, I was going on and on about elevated horror. 13 years ago, West was at the bleeding edge of art horror, and now, it has somewhat passed him by; but I don't think that's an exactly fair way to put it. It's almost more like, with X, he's trying to de-elevate the genre, or whatever the correct verb is that's less absurdly ugly than "de-elevate". That is to say, while indie horror has spent the last six or seven years deciding that there's some gross and plebian about mucking around in the grubby stuff of the genre, X proudly brings us right into the heart of horror cinema at its most sordid and exploitative. And it does this without sacrificing any of the intellectual density that "elevated horror" is so proud of.
The result is, I think, West's best film to date, a perfect mixture of base instincts and airy philosophy presented in sometimes dreamy tone. Which is a mode that a great deal of vintage '70s horror occupied, and at the level of sheer pastiche, X is terrifically persuasive. It's a tribute to scuzzy grind house filmmaking right from its plot: Wayne (Martin Henderson), the owner of a nasty-looking strip club called Bayou Burlesque, somewhere in the industrial hinterlands of Houston, has decided that the best way to make some quick money is to produce a pornographic film, starring his girlfriend/employee Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), fellow stripper Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), and Bobby-Lynne's sometimes lover Jackson Hole (Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi). The director is to be a pretentious little try-hard named RJ (Owen Campbell), who wants to make the proverbial "good adult film", and the sound recordist is RJ's girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). And the location is a farm deep in the heart of Texas, where an ancient man named Howard (Stephen Ure) has very reluctantly offered Wayne use of a ratty old outbuilding, not having any real clue what the young folks are up to.
RJ's insistence on making art out of pornography, and the film's amused dislike of him for this reason, gives away the game: X is among other things a metacommentary on the eternal struggle between "this film is an artfully curious look at how we conceive of sex in our society, as a tension between desire and disgust, prurience and prudery" and "this movie's got titties". The difference between West and many of his elevated horror descendants is that he's still interested in the twin spectacles of nudity and gory, the Alpha and Omega of exploitation cinema, even as his script is ironically detached from those things. X is not trying to downplay its genre: it's a really great exploitation film, gleeful in showing us squalid content - Goth and Snow go topless, Kid Cudi goes bottomless, and the gore effects leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. Early on, the intrepid pornographers drive by the carcass of a cow that has fully exploded in a collision with a semi truck, and West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett dig in to show the extremely convincing special effects from a linger, close angle. Later, the first murder of a human is staged with the theatricality of a giallo, a man's neck getting stabbed repeatedly on camera till it's just a collar of raw meat, splashing jets of blood onto the headlights of a car positioned in exactly the right spot to create a physically unlikely but visually marvelous flare of cherry-red light over the killer and the victim.
For yes, there are murders: Howard and his dazed old wife Pearl (also Goth, entombed in latex) are deranged slasher types, and Pearl in particular is so consumed with sexual repression and frustration that a glimpse of the sex scenes being filmed on their property drives her into a murderous fugue state. One of the great tricks West plays with X is to create an ongoing sense of nervous terror long before this plot development actually happens - it's at least the halfway point that X even announces itself as a horror film, in fact, with nothing other than Howard's surly attitude and readiness to wave around a shotgun suggesting there's anything going on other than just the making of low-rent smut. But the film is unbearably tense, even so, rendering the farm as a purgatorial void, two lonely buildings and an empty field ending feebly at a wall of trees. West has always been an attentive student of period storytelling, and he's captured here the exact kind of hollow vagueness common to a great many '70s American horror films with one eye on European arthouse cinema. It's particularly apparent during an early sequence when Maxine wanders away from the shoot to skinny dip in the opaque pond behind the woods: there's an almost surreal quality to the way that Goth is blocked and shot, and and even the slightly odd look of her smear of violet eye shadow and her costume (denim overalls, no bra, cowboy boots - Malgosia Turzanska's costume designs are wonderful throughout, pinning down not just "the '70s", but a specific hot, humid, rural, and poor version of the '70s). The music by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe is at its best here, focused around the dreamy cries of a solitary female voice, covering the entire sequence with an otherworldly sonic vibe. At a certain point, Maxine floats in the water mere yards from an alligator, gliding smoothly towards her; it's all unhurried and glacially slow (she never sees the reptile), and the sheer lack of urgency in the blocking, contrasted with increasingly frantic cross-cutting by West and co-editor David Kashevaroff, creates a perfectly unendurable tension that evokes the peculiar sludginess of a nightmare where you can't run no matter how fast you pump your legs.
That detached, nightmarish feeling is powerful throughout the first, horror-free hour of X, and it makes the leering sexploitation of that hour seem curiously terrifying and ominous. Meanwhile, the sheer excess of the bloodier, slasher-movie second half is paired with an unexpectedly pronounced sense of humor: it's never a comedy, as-such, but it's awfully deadpan most of the time, undercutting the horror even as it's ramping up.
The result of all this is a film with the brash energy of exploitation, but turned into something weird and slippery, and that's before getting to the question of what the film is doing with its sexually overheated story. To point out that X is "about repression" is to state the excessively obvious; it's stated directly in dialogue by multiple characters, and it courses throughout the film in the form of a televangelist who keeps showing up, throughout the movie. The dual casting of Goth as Maxine and Pearl makes sets them up as mirrors, two different responses to enforced sexual repression that both lead to destruction - the film climaxes on a plot beat played with a dark, nasty energy that makes it hard to say that Maxine is a straightforward hero, and her extreme reaction against a repressive upbringing is maybe not the healthy liberation it looked like. So perhaps that's what the film is on about: avoiding extremes. But then we must consider that the film is itself an extreme, wallowing in sex and violence without any suggestion we're supposed to feel conflicted about those things.
I do not come to solve X, anyways, nor even to claim that it has an answer. "Sex is complicated" gets us far enough, especially given that this is a horror movie, not a philosophical tract, and it's extravagantly proud to be one. It's smart enough to avoid being a simple exercise in vulgar sensory overload, but vulgar enough that it's still a ton of fun to watch it; it's great example of a film getting to have it both ways, rising above the genre while diving headfirst into the gutter. It's an ambivalent love letter to the '70s proto-slasher; but the love ends up being much more palpable than the ambivalence.
The eight years West has spent away from the genre have found horror radically transform, and a big part of that transformation has been towards a subgenre we might not unreasonably call "Ti West-style movies". The academics in your life probably call it "elevated horror", the normie horror fans probably call it "fucking boring and pretentious", but either way, it's basically what happens when you combine indie art cinema with witches and monsters and serial killers and whatnot. West didn't exactly invent this most unexpectedly appealing flavor combination, but his 2009 The House of the Devil, which applied the slow shagginess of what we then called "mumblecore" to a slasher-like tale of Satanists, was undoubtedly a watershed moment, and he was attached to some key titles in the years that followed: acting in 2011's You're Next, directing a segment of 2012's V/H/S, and generally just being around. Flash-forward a decade, and most of the people in West's immediate sphere of influence aren't really active in the genre anymore, but the mixture of character study and aesthetic pastiche that West pioneered in The House of the Devil and 2011's The Innkeepers has become a self-perpetuating cottage industry, the financial lifeblood of indie distributor A24, and the only kind of horror film watched by some of the most annoying people on Film Twitter.
This is an awful lot of preamble, but I think it's necessary to get us to West's eighth feature (distributed by the very same A24), with the impeccably simple title X: it's a return to the gimmick of West's greatest success, re-creating in minute detail the visual style and tone of a past incarnation of the horror genre. In this case, the time is 1979 - a year announced in a title card so bombastic that I somewhat wonder if at one point 1979 was the film's intended title - and the style is a few years out-of-date by then, and I don't think that's a complete accident. The film's subjects are a group of people who are certainly chasing a trend that was mostly used up by then, and the feeling that we're watching giddy amateurs get in over their heads is a big part of what makes X tick as a horror movie. But first, I was going on and on about elevated horror. 13 years ago, West was at the bleeding edge of art horror, and now, it has somewhat passed him by; but I don't think that's an exactly fair way to put it. It's almost more like, with X, he's trying to de-elevate the genre, or whatever the correct verb is that's less absurdly ugly than "de-elevate". That is to say, while indie horror has spent the last six or seven years deciding that there's some gross and plebian about mucking around in the grubby stuff of the genre, X proudly brings us right into the heart of horror cinema at its most sordid and exploitative. And it does this without sacrificing any of the intellectual density that "elevated horror" is so proud of.
The result is, I think, West's best film to date, a perfect mixture of base instincts and airy philosophy presented in sometimes dreamy tone. Which is a mode that a great deal of vintage '70s horror occupied, and at the level of sheer pastiche, X is terrifically persuasive. It's a tribute to scuzzy grind house filmmaking right from its plot: Wayne (Martin Henderson), the owner of a nasty-looking strip club called Bayou Burlesque, somewhere in the industrial hinterlands of Houston, has decided that the best way to make some quick money is to produce a pornographic film, starring his girlfriend/employee Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), fellow stripper Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), and Bobby-Lynne's sometimes lover Jackson Hole (Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi). The director is to be a pretentious little try-hard named RJ (Owen Campbell), who wants to make the proverbial "good adult film", and the sound recordist is RJ's girlfriend, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). And the location is a farm deep in the heart of Texas, where an ancient man named Howard (Stephen Ure) has very reluctantly offered Wayne use of a ratty old outbuilding, not having any real clue what the young folks are up to.
RJ's insistence on making art out of pornography, and the film's amused dislike of him for this reason, gives away the game: X is among other things a metacommentary on the eternal struggle between "this film is an artfully curious look at how we conceive of sex in our society, as a tension between desire and disgust, prurience and prudery" and "this movie's got titties". The difference between West and many of his elevated horror descendants is that he's still interested in the twin spectacles of nudity and gory, the Alpha and Omega of exploitation cinema, even as his script is ironically detached from those things. X is not trying to downplay its genre: it's a really great exploitation film, gleeful in showing us squalid content - Goth and Snow go topless, Kid Cudi goes bottomless, and the gore effects leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. Early on, the intrepid pornographers drive by the carcass of a cow that has fully exploded in a collision with a semi truck, and West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett dig in to show the extremely convincing special effects from a linger, close angle. Later, the first murder of a human is staged with the theatricality of a giallo, a man's neck getting stabbed repeatedly on camera till it's just a collar of raw meat, splashing jets of blood onto the headlights of a car positioned in exactly the right spot to create a physically unlikely but visually marvelous flare of cherry-red light over the killer and the victim.
For yes, there are murders: Howard and his dazed old wife Pearl (also Goth, entombed in latex) are deranged slasher types, and Pearl in particular is so consumed with sexual repression and frustration that a glimpse of the sex scenes being filmed on their property drives her into a murderous fugue state. One of the great tricks West plays with X is to create an ongoing sense of nervous terror long before this plot development actually happens - it's at least the halfway point that X even announces itself as a horror film, in fact, with nothing other than Howard's surly attitude and readiness to wave around a shotgun suggesting there's anything going on other than just the making of low-rent smut. But the film is unbearably tense, even so, rendering the farm as a purgatorial void, two lonely buildings and an empty field ending feebly at a wall of trees. West has always been an attentive student of period storytelling, and he's captured here the exact kind of hollow vagueness common to a great many '70s American horror films with one eye on European arthouse cinema. It's particularly apparent during an early sequence when Maxine wanders away from the shoot to skinny dip in the opaque pond behind the woods: there's an almost surreal quality to the way that Goth is blocked and shot, and and even the slightly odd look of her smear of violet eye shadow and her costume (denim overalls, no bra, cowboy boots - Malgosia Turzanska's costume designs are wonderful throughout, pinning down not just "the '70s", but a specific hot, humid, rural, and poor version of the '70s). The music by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe is at its best here, focused around the dreamy cries of a solitary female voice, covering the entire sequence with an otherworldly sonic vibe. At a certain point, Maxine floats in the water mere yards from an alligator, gliding smoothly towards her; it's all unhurried and glacially slow (she never sees the reptile), and the sheer lack of urgency in the blocking, contrasted with increasingly frantic cross-cutting by West and co-editor David Kashevaroff, creates a perfectly unendurable tension that evokes the peculiar sludginess of a nightmare where you can't run no matter how fast you pump your legs.
That detached, nightmarish feeling is powerful throughout the first, horror-free hour of X, and it makes the leering sexploitation of that hour seem curiously terrifying and ominous. Meanwhile, the sheer excess of the bloodier, slasher-movie second half is paired with an unexpectedly pronounced sense of humor: it's never a comedy, as-such, but it's awfully deadpan most of the time, undercutting the horror even as it's ramping up.
The result of all this is a film with the brash energy of exploitation, but turned into something weird and slippery, and that's before getting to the question of what the film is doing with its sexually overheated story. To point out that X is "about repression" is to state the excessively obvious; it's stated directly in dialogue by multiple characters, and it courses throughout the film in the form of a televangelist who keeps showing up, throughout the movie. The dual casting of Goth as Maxine and Pearl makes sets them up as mirrors, two different responses to enforced sexual repression that both lead to destruction - the film climaxes on a plot beat played with a dark, nasty energy that makes it hard to say that Maxine is a straightforward hero, and her extreme reaction against a repressive upbringing is maybe not the healthy liberation it looked like. So perhaps that's what the film is on about: avoiding extremes. But then we must consider that the film is itself an extreme, wallowing in sex and violence without any suggestion we're supposed to feel conflicted about those things.
I do not come to solve X, anyways, nor even to claim that it has an answer. "Sex is complicated" gets us far enough, especially given that this is a horror movie, not a philosophical tract, and it's extravagantly proud to be one. It's smart enough to avoid being a simple exercise in vulgar sensory overload, but vulgar enough that it's still a ton of fun to watch it; it's great example of a film getting to have it both ways, rising above the genre while diving headfirst into the gutter. It's an ambivalent love letter to the '70s proto-slasher; but the love ends up being much more palpable than the ambivalence.
