Slasher ‘X’ mines the horrors of growing old
Film anchored in universal fears has sex, gore, dual roles
Mia Goth really wasn’t interested in making another horror film. Then she read the surprising and provocative script for “X,” writer-director Ti West’s blood-soaked return to the genre after nearly a decade, about an amateur porn crew whose film shoot on a rural Texas farm sends their geriatric hosts into a murderous tizzy.
Channeling exploitation cinema influences through a decidedly modern lens, the rollicking ’70s-style slasher, in theaters now, oozes smart and salacious thrills under the banner of art-house distributor A24. As the credits roll on the company’s first horror franchise, many moviegoers will be surprised to discover the film’s wildest gambit, which is also the reason Goth came aboard West’s R-rated sex- and gore-fueled romp.
In “X,” Goth (“Suspiria,” “High Life”) is transfixing as Maxine, a cocaine-fueled stripper eyeing adult film stardom as her ticket to the life she craves. And in a second role, transformed by makeup and prosthetics, she also plays Pearl, one of the farm’s elderly owners and the film’s surprising villain, driven to violence by her lusty envy of the nubile youngsters getting busy in her boardinghouse.
The physical and psychological challenge of embodying two characters as perversely simpatico souls “was just not something that comes your way every day,” Goth said. “They see each other very much in themselves. That’s rather invigorating. And for Maxine, it’s pretty terrifying.”
To do it, Goth switched between characters on
different days and weeks, spent eight hours at a time in a makeup chair and performed opposite body doubles. Where Maxine’s sexual openness was at times “challenging to find within my own self — but also very liberating,” said Goth, playing Pearl required her to stay within the physical range of an octogenarian while losing herself in the character’s gory reveries.
Of all the conceptual big swings in “X” — to be followed by “Pearl,” a prequel secretly filmed back-to-back with “X” last year, starring and co-written by Goth — the unusual dual role tapped into the intentional way West, who also co-edited the film with David Kashevaroff, sought to highlight film craft in his return to horror.
Shot outside Whanganui, New Zealand, on immersive sets built by
production designer Tom Hammock and lensed with evocative visual style by cinematographer Eliot Rockett, the world of “X” is texturally dense by design, rife with film references, cinematic nods and Easter eggs for West’s other movies, including “Pearl.”
After his last feature, the 2016 Western “In a Valley of Violence,” West spent several years directing television. Drawn back to genre but finding mainstream horror somewhat uninspiring, he wrote “X” at the intersection of independent horror and porn — two “symbiotic” outliers of Hollywood. Even that choice was a risk, West admits; in the wrong hands, the same film could easily veer into lurid territory. Had A24 said no, he said, “I don’t think I would have made the movie.”
Setting it in 1979 against the waning American
New Wave, West invented an ensemble of wannabe filmmakers shooting a XXX-rated independent movie in the cash-strapped Texas countryside.
Instead of rural cannibals or masked stalkers, he anchored the horrors of “X” in universal fears of getting older, growing obsolete and the terror of living a life unfulfilled — the kind of existential dread just about anyone, perhaps especially artist types, might relate to.
It’s what Brittany Snow, alum of the “Pitch Perfect” films, connected with when she read “X.” “I remember saying to (West), ‘Wow, you made a movie about the fear that takes hold of you when you’re getting older,’ ” said Snow, who goes boldly against type as the shrewd and uninhibited BobbyLynne. “The scariest part of the whole movie is that you feel for the villains because
we’re all going to be those people eventually.”
“X” follows the ragtag crew of “The Farmer’s Daughters,” led by executive producer Wayne (Martin Henderson); swingers Bobby-Lynne (Snow) and ex-Marine Jackson Hole (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi); and Wayne’s younger fiancée, Maxine (Goth), who pack into a van with director RJ (Owen Campbell) and his conservative gal pal Lorraine (Jenna Ortega).
Filming their hardcore opus under the puritanical nose of the gun-toting farmstead’s owner — Howard (Stephen Ure), who worries that his ailing wife, Pearl, will catch wind of their guests’ sordid activities — the crew trades philosophical barbs over art, sex and freedom when they’re not getting down to business, singing a little Fleetwood Mac and taking dips in a gator-filled pond — until tensions erupt into bloodshed.
Before signing on to a role involving intimate scenes, nudity and depictions of sex work, however, Snow had questions for West.
“I wanted to know why he wanted to make something like this, and I wanted to know that he was a man who had a lens on this that wasn’t going to be gratuitous or exploitative of women in general, and of women as sexual objects at that time,” said Snow, who is now prepping her own directorial debut, “September 17th.” “But I think what was at the core of what he wanted to do was so much more intelligent and sex-positive and women-empowering.”
In a genre hallmarked by “final girl” tropes in which virginal young women are usually the ones who outlast their peers, “X” offers a rebuttal in its spectrum of characters who have agency over their sexual wants and general desires. Even its empathy for Howard and Pearl argues that jealousy, repression and judgment are poisons that lead to violence — and no one, even us watching, is necessarily immune.
West has designs on a third film to complete the trilogy, but A24 hasn’t yet dated “Pearl,” which will rewind in time to explore the young Pearl’s back story circa 1918.
“I’m interested to see what people think of ‘X,’ and then I’m interested to see how they feel about ‘Pearl,’ ” he said, “and then I’m interested to see how they feel about them both together. And if we are fortunate enough to then do another one ... There’s something interesting to me about the bigger picture of it all because I’ve never had that opportunity.
It’s unlikely I’ll have that opportunity again.”