PopHorror Let's Get Scared
X is a welcome return to the horror genre for director Ti West. After years of assorted television work and the underrated Ethan Hawke western, In A Valley of Violence, the man behind House of the Devil is back to his roots with a gritty, wild ride of a slasher film. The premise is a tale as old as time… the one where some kids in the ’70s rent a barn to shoot a porno and start getting hacked to pieces. No? Okay, well maybe that’s just a classic fairy tale only in the horror community, but it does serve as a security blanket in the familiar yet foreign desolation of rural Texas. This playground was most famously exploited by Tobe Hooper for the 1973 classic, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but since has become a horror trope in and of itself having influenced dozens of grimy, on-the-road slasher films over the past 50 years. Despite a new Texas Chainsaw movie coming out just a few weeks prior, X ends up as the true progeny.
This past year has seen new entries in the Halloween and Scream franchises as well as the previously mentioned Texas Chainsaw sequel; on paper, that is hugely exciting. But the results have been a mixed bag with some spectacularly high highs and some awfully low lows. Perhaps the biggest misstep in these sequels is their willingness to play within the safe confines of their franchises, never taking the genre defining risks of their forebearers. X manages to navigate similar waters but stands out in a similar way You’re Next (a film West appears in as an actor) did amongst the slasher films of a decade ago. X is fun, funny, violent, and uncomfortable—sometimes simultaneously—which leads to a peculiar viewing experience. I was in a theater that had people laughing hysterically while others were audibly gasping. While the horror is undeniable, how seriously you take it is seemingly up to the viewer.
The plot of X is pretty straight forward. Three Houston couples head out to a farmhouse a few hours away to shoot a cheap porno movie to cash in on the Debbie Does Dallas craze. The elderly couple running the property are seemingly on the brink of being unable to care for themselves and naturally have no idea what the couples are getting up to. Once the cameras begin to roll and night falls on the property, tensions begin to arise amongst the couples, culminating with the elderly man seeking out help when his wife comes up missing… or maybe she’s out hunting?
From that point, the bodies start piling up briskly and in some unexpected manners. The cast really carries the opening 40 minutes or so, being surprisingly likeable despite some caricature-level characteristics. Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi holds the screen well while Jenna Ortega and Brittany Snow bring some interesting yet competing personalities to the scream queen arena. The true standout here is Mia Goth, playing a dual role as one of the actresses in the movie and completely unrecognizable under heavy makeup playing the potentially homicidal elderly owner of the farm. I was completely fooled by this throughout the duration of the film, though it seems obvious in retrospect considering the direction that the story takes.
The second half of the film picks up the action and uses some spectacular camera lens tricks to keep up the 1970s aesthetic. There isn’t a whole lot of mystery to what’s going on; West allows us to be in on who is doing the killing, and we can safely assume who is going to be killed. That certainly isn’t the normal approach, but this certainly isn’t the normal slasher movie. The suspense is more in the “when” and “how” as opposed to the “who.” Honestly, the main source of nightmare fuel in this movie doesn’t come from any of the violence but from what is easily the most disturbing (in a gross way, no trigger warnings) sex scene I’ve seen in recent memory. Despite the visual gruesomeness, X never loses its sense of humor even if it is often drier than the sunbaked blood on a hot Texas porch the morning after a massacre.
I find myself wanting to revisit X as soon as possible. I saw the trailer in front of a different movie the following night and realized I liked it much more 24 hours later than I did immediately after leaving the theater. X is—and I’m a big fan so no shade here—the movie Rob Zombie has been trying to make for the last 15 years. It matches his dirty, extraordinarily violent world view but in a less vulgar manner (even on a porn set), allowing for a broader audience and, I’m going to assume, some critical praise. West now has a ’70s slasher and an ’80s Satanic panic movie under his belt, along with a modern ghost story and found footage entries, all of which are held in high regard. Hopefully, the studios continue to take notice and let the man keep making feature films! Ti West recently revealed that he shot a short film prequel during production and has a sequel planned, so as long as audiences are happy with the finished product, we should be getting to go back into this twisted little world sooner than later.
