Slasher films have had a minor resurgence. In the past year, there have been new entries in the Scream, Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises. All these sequels and remixes are oddly timid, maybe even conservative, because they feel the need to honor a genre typically defined by the celebration of bad taste. Perhaps Ti West, the writer and director of X, also shares that frustration. His film has new characters, albeit in a familiar situation, and that frees him to make nods to his influences without being slovenly about it. Straightforward in its approach and execution, X is weirdly charming because it imagines a different kind of slasher antagonists and explores how, despite significant limitations, they can still be creepy.
It is the late 1970s, a period where seemingly all young people – the sexually liberated in particular – could fall victim to violent weirdos. Whereas many slasher victims are young horny co-eds, here we have young horny co-ed professionals. X follows the producers, actors, and crew of a porno movie. They have a shoestring budget, but the director/cameraman RJ (Owen Campbell) thinks he can create smut that’s still cinematic. The producer Wayne (Martin Henderson) and the star Maxine (Mia Goth) do not share RJ’s ambition; they simply think sex sells, and a burgeoning home video market may lead to a windfall. The movie within a movie is called “The Farmer’s Daughters,” so Wayne arranges a stay at a country house for the shoot’s duration. The arrangement is with Howard (Stephen Ure), who is old, grotesque and deeply unpleasant. The shoot gets underway, but it does not take long for the bodies to start piling up.
Like West’s earlier films, X takes its time to build toward carnage. There are lengthy scenes where Wayne, Maxine and the others shoot the shit, wander around or fuck on camera. This might seem unnecessary, except West establishes traits/flaws so that we understand each bad choice the characters make. At one point, a character wanders out of the house in only their underwear, not even wearing shoes. Are they really that stupid? Don’t they know they’re in a scary movie? X has just enough character development to answer those questions convincingly. Along those lines, the kills in the film are more predictable than chaotic. West’s preferred technique is how to hint at exactly what you think will happen, then delay that payoff. The cumulative effect is more suspenseful than scary, although West makes up the difference with abundant gore.
While some slasher films keep the killer’s identity anonymous, this one tells who they are fairly early. Maybe that choice eliminates some surprise, but West uses the choice as an opportunity to consider the impasses and resentment that inform the murder. In addition to Howard, the pornographers must contend with his wife Pearl (also Goth, in a dual role). Sure, she is a deranged crone, but she was also young once. X explicitly considers the indignity of advanced age, and how a withered body does not stop the need to feel desired. That tension unfolds in increasingly queasy ways, leading to dual love scenes where Pearl seeks sexual release that perhaps her guests awakened. West has sympathy for his killers, and I suspect older audiences who aren’t so limber anymore may share that point of view. It won’t be long until we are more decrepit than lithe.
Besides the tension between older and younger generations, West includes enough subtext to make X a demented microcosm of late twentieth century America. Kid Cudi plays Jackson, a well-endowed porn star, and there is unspoken racial tension between him and Howard, to say nothing of resentment over the virility one possesses and the other lacks (Jackson is a former marine, and his Vietnam experience lead him down paths his castmates would not dare explore). West also depicts the rise of televangelism, a kind of moralizing that has no use to Maxine and the others, but may infect how everyone else around them thinks. That is not to say, however, the subtext means West has some delusions of grandeur.
The combination of pornography and slasher horror has been explored before. Perhaps you have seen Knife + Heart, the French Giallo throwback where a madman terrorizes the actors at a gay porno studio with extra sharp sex toys. In these films, the two genres have complementary sensibilities, since they indulge genuine impulses that are mostly the stuff about our daydreams. Where Knife + Heart ultimately serves as a critique of homophobia during the AIDS epidemic, X explores a period of American life whose echoes can still be felt today. Sure, there is a self-awareness at work, and ultimately it does not matter to West whether his audience can also see it. His sensibilities are too traditional for that.
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