X (Ti West, 2022)
Ti West is an interesting filmmaker. He's brought us the homage to eighties horror in the form of House of the Devil, the quasi-mumble core spookfest of The Innkeepers, the found footage freakout inspired by Jonestown in The Sacrement. Having taken six years away from movies, doing some work in TV, he's back and has cooked up this love letter to the relationship between horror and porn as a way to create a meditation on attitudes about sex, aging and youth called X.
It's not explicit in the film itself, but the relationship between horror and porn was a staple of 70's cinema. To start, a number of horror filmmakers got their start in porn or would go and make porn in between making horror films to keep their bills paid. The visionary Wes Craven, among the titans of the genre, kept himself in food and housing by making porn after his controversial debut The Last House on the Left rendered him too radioactive a name for a number of years. Sean Cunningham, the man responsible for the Friday the 13th franchise dabbled in porn as a way to pull together enough money to make more mainstream films. William Lustig, who'd live and die in infamy as the director of Maniac and the Maniac Cop film series, started off making porn. Those are just the most recognizable names in horror who made their way through adult cinema at some point.
What pornography and horror also had in common was that they were as close to a guaranteed return on investment as movies could be. They could be made on low budgets, and the existence of grindhouse and adult theaters in cities across the country meant there was a market hungry for films to show. Everyone was hoping they were going to make the next Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Deepthroat or Debbie Does Dallas. I can't speak to Deepthroat or Debbie Does Dallas, but neither Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ended up paying the filmmakers, crew or actors much of anything. Some of this was due to inexperience on their part, and the rest was due to generally shady business practices by "producers" who financed the films. The popularity and notoriety of those films still fueled dreams of making it big in horror movies. In an interview with Indiewire, Ti West detailed some of his ideas about the relationship between horror and porn.
It's clear one of the primary influences for X is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There are a handful of shots in the first half of X which look like they could have been cut from Toby Hooper's seminal horror masterpiece. It's also set in rural Texas. West also makes use of the idea of naive, idealistic young people stumbling into a world they couldn't be prepared to understand. Like the family of cannibals in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the villains in this film are living by a relationship far outside of the bounds of what's considered normal or even transgressive at the time.
X centers on a group of young people who are setting out to make a porn. The "producer," Wayne (played by Martin Henderson in an unusual variety of role for the actor) is a strip club owner who is looking to hit it big in the porn industry and leave strip club behind. He even mentions Debbie Does Dallas as the inspiration for this scheme at one point. In his cast is his girlfriend Maxine, also a dancer at the club (Mia Goth), another dancer named Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson, Bobby-Lynne's occasional paramore (played by Kid Cudi). His crew consists of camera operator RJ (Owen Campbell), who has designs on lifting the finished film to something more artistic than the run of the mill "dirty movie" and Lorraine, RJ's girlfiend (Jenna Ortega, who's having a great year) as their sound engineer. They depart the strip club following the girls shift and head to a farm, where Wayne has contacted the owner about renting the boarding house on the property for the weekend. Howard (Stephen Ure), the old man Wayne spoke to on the phone about renting the place is not the friendliest of people, but they manage to convince him to let them stay with a fistful of cash. It turns out Howard has no idea Wayne and company are planning to shoot a pornographic film on his property. This being a horror film, things go wrong, badly wrong, but not exactly for the reasons one would expect given this premise.
West does something really interesting with the film. He sets up this group of young people, who are engaging in what would still be a somewhat transgressive venture today, but was even more so back then, gets into the production of this porn, and then juxtaposes these people with a whole other set of ideas about sex, aging and youth held by Howard and his wife, Pearl. Mia Goth pulls double duty, playing both Maxine and, under a heavy amount of disturbing prosthetics, the elderly Pearl. It's undeniably a smart decision, considering where the film goes, and what it seems to be saying about attitudes about youth, aging and sex. West has a knack for attracting good actors and getting strong performances out of them, and he does so here. There's a level of subtlety to what he's doing with this film which is going to slip by audiences who are just going to see this because it's a bloody good time at the movies, and it comes through in the performances and the themes more than anything else. With X, he uses that subtlety to deliver a film which is a crowd pleaser for general horror audiences, and has enough on its mind to satisfy those of us who most enjoy horror when it gives us a bit more to chew on than blood, boobs and guts. It has all of those things, but that's not the point of its existence either.
Mia Goth is proving to be one of the most dependable actresses of her generation, and generally doesn't get the credit she deserves outside of genre circles. She does some great work here as both Maxine and Pearl. Both characters have a degree of pathos that comes through in the performance that we don't really get dialogue to express. She's just beginning to get her recognition as one of her generations pre-eminent Scream Queens, as she has a resume full of genre films. She always succeeds in giving the film the performance her role needs to make it work, and in cases like X and 2018's Suspiria, she's plainly excellent.
Jenna Ortega is the other standout, giving her character a depth which would be missed in a less intelligent performers hands. X clocks in at one hour and forty-five minutes, so because we essentially have eight characters, none of them get the time to really stretch, but Ortega does a lot with what she's given. Ortega is also on her way to Scream Queen status as this is the third horror film this year alone, after co-starring in the latest Scream entry and the horror comedy starring the Foo Fighters, Studio 666.
X is Ti West's most focused and disciplined film so far. It also does seem to be the one where he has perfected his way of creating a film with resonant ideas and themes, while making it accessible to general horror audiences too. His debut House of the Devil and his follow-up The Innkeepers both tended toward the ponderous, being a bit slow for a lot of the horror crowd. X moves along at a brisk pace, while still exploiting his eye for detail which made those films stand out. He gets something about how people relate to each other which gives his characters more of a feeling of realness than they would seem capable of having in summary. His "big 3" horror films, House of the Devil, The Innkeepers and now, X, all employ that understanding extremely well.
West also keeps coming back to questions of work and money, how we relate to them and how they effect us. Here, he's exploring the relationship between sex, money, ambition and youth. This is unusual for a horror director, as these are usually either just completely unexamined or just convenient plot devices to help move the story forward. With West, they take a central part in what motivates the characters, how they see themselves and how these things lead them into and through his films. It's an added depth to his characters and the film overall.
Apparently while it was in theaters, the film was followed by a trailer for a surprise prequel which West has already finished called Pearl. Given what he's done with X, it's basically guaranteed to draw an audience in to see the genesis of one of the more interesting horror characters to come along in a while. I'm definitely interested to see where Pearl comes from and just how she comes to be the character we see in X.