Freedom, Love, and Fun: The Ingredients That Go into X

Time to talk about X from director Ti West. Spoilers littered throughout.

Slasher and horror films have been fairly dull and uninspiring in the past ten to fifteen years and only occasionally do a few sprout out of the ground when Jordan Peele isn’t carrying horror on his back. One such film is X, a film by Ti West who is a director I hadn’t really heard of before. I’ll have to go back and take a look at some of his other films after this fantastic outing. It’s something I can’t really go into detail without spoiling so this is another moment where I tell you to fuck off if you haven’t seen this yet. Please, go and watch this before reading the rest. It’s a great experience and is very much the epitome of the less you know the better.

Now that’s out of the way we can move on to the film. It’s set up as a group of mostly young people in 1979 who set out to a rural cabin to film an porno. They all have that southern drawl and the atmosphere is that of freedom and fun. It does a great job of settling in the characters with fun banter and one of the best opening shots I’ve seen in a horror or slasher film ever. The intro itself is a preview of what’s to come before we go back to the group of mostly youngsters setting out around twenty-four hours beforehand. The film keeps repeating the lines of ‘making a good dirty movie’. Which is a little meta as the film goes forward as they shoot their porno within this art house slasher. Even that description itself is a little off as slashers tend towards the more generic and schlocky films and the more art house films tend towards the horror genre rather than its sibling. But X does this beautifully. The film puts forward a few themes. It nails them brilliantly with various allusions in the dialogue and with short, small shots to tie everything together. It is a bizarre set of ingredients that make up this slasher film but they make it work.

The first and most prominent one is of Maxine’s freedom. Throughout the film she is the archetypal free spirit as she snorts cocaine with her partner and the porno’s producer as they travel across the country to film. She’s comfortable, like most of the other characters, about filming the porno with someone other than their partner, and is basically the only one in the film to choose her destiny as she escapes the madness that ensues as a result of Pearl’s actions. This is thoroughly hit hard at the end of the film as it is revealed that the preacher on the television set we’ve been seeing clips of throughout the film is in fact Maxine’s father. Not only does it give background to Maxine’s place in the world but also brings up some great themes of parental control and far-right religious fever. The first is questioning whether she would be better off in a ‘stable’ home where her father would help her through life with none of the ‘temptations’ in her path whilst allowing the audience’s minds to wonder whether the control and likely mental, if not verbal, abuse that she may have suffered drove her away from what should be a loving family. You could falsely view some of the themes presented in X as more of the other side of the argument and that actually all of this mess is the result of both Maxine and Pearl being led into ‘sin’ by evildoers. But to do so would be a gross misinterpretation of the film as it very much treats Maxine with the most care and punishes the others who make a number of references to religion, even if they agree with the more care-free attitude to life. Another aspect of freedom is the constant encroachment of time. You have the main protagonist and antagonist played by the same actor, Mia Goth, where both are essentially the same character but at very different stages of their lives. Pearl constantly talks about how the young group is flaunting their age in front of her. Rather than the typical idea of an old person being a prude, Pearl is longing for her days as a youth and is primarily jealous of the group which serves as her main reason for hunting the characters throughout the second half of the film.

Then we turn to love. Nearly all of the characters in the film are in love, or at least a relationship, with another character but none of these are tested and shown more than the old couple of Pearl and Howard, as well as the younger couple of Lorraine and RJ. The latter start off as a fairly stable relationship where, even though she is religious, Lorraine is happy to help out with the sound for her boyfriend’s porno that he has written and films. They are tested though, when after a discussion of how the actors separate the sex within the porno from that of their regular lives, Lorraine asks to be in the film. RJ is defiant of her taking part and shows that he truly isn’t as comfortable as he was perceived to be in the previous conversation. It also ties into the previous theme of freedom as RJ tries to limit Lorraine’s freedom before he eventually caves in after a talk from the producer, Wayne. The experience breaks RJ and he is unable to deal with the situation. It harks back to the parental control themes I mentioned earlier as well as the idea of how different relationships are and how the boundaries are stretched for each individual. RJ is ready to leave that night until he is stopped by Pearl. Slasher antics ensue but I want to focus currently on the relationship between Pearl and Howard which starts to show more from this point in the film till the end. Using two young actors, one of them being the same actor for Maxine, was an interesting choice but one that makes sense considering Pearl’s motivations and the secret prequel they made whilst filming X. Pearl and Howard’s relationship is the only one that starts off broken and slowly gets repaired over the course of the film. As the young and horny group are in their cabin Pearl slowly becomes aware of the group and sees them shooting one of the scenes between Maxine and Jackson. Her longing for sex with her husband is denied as he states his heart problems prevent him from doing so. And this starts Pearl’s descent into the Slasher section of the film. After some killings and a kidnapping. Howard and Pearl discuss the murders and they end up talking about Pearl’s desires again. Pearl this time claims Howard’s heart might not be able to take it but she eventually caves in and the pair have sex. For the rest of the film, though short their lives are, the pair appear much more connected and satisfied with their lives. They’ve repaired the bridge but left a slew of bodies on their path. The last sign of this is when Lorraine gets shot by Howard and they drag her body inside. The body twitches and sends Howard into an actual heart attack. At this moment, even when Maxine comes round the corner with a revolver pointed at Pearl, Pearl can only worry about Howard and he is slowly being taken away from her after she just got him back.

Then we move onto the last theme of fun. It might be less of a theme and more of a feeling of the film but it is certainly cemented in the relationship of Bobby-Lynne and Jackson. From the beginning we’re told they kind of have a relationship, as expressed further with Bobby-Lynne perfectly happy for Jackson to perform a scene with Maxine, but that they are only there to have fun. There’s a little bit of more seriousness from Jackson which only pushes Bobby-Lynne to be the main focus of the fun theme for the film. She is the most outwardly happy of the entire cast and actually serves as the main opponent to the fervorous controlling view of people like the preacher. Even the small bits of comedy we throughout the film usually are focused on, or at least contains, Bobby-Lynne. The rest of the film also gives a great fun to the adventure, even if it is a slasher film where nearly everyone dies. When it comes to the slasher kills, the gore and violence has that unique fun vibe to it you get from a cheesy slasher film even if this film is actually fairly serious, and deconstructs a lot of the horror — and mainly slasher — tropes. Each kill provides a fun shot and great callbacks or references whilst keeping the gore painful to watch and not full of some obvious prosthetic or bad looking blood.

If somehow you’ve read this without watching the film, I suggest you go and do that now. It’s a great experience that is rare to find in horror and slasher films currently. I do need to go and look at the prequel as well as the upcoming sequel, MaXXXine, once it gets released.

It’ll be our secret.

-Boad