A team of pornographers face off against slut-shaming hillbillies, in A24 slasher X. Eliza Janssen appreciated its clever voyeuristic lens and slowed-down scares.
Gosh, I love independent filmmaking. Not that Ti West’s new slasher X is so authentically grubby: it’s distributed by powerhouse A24, stars some of the hottest established scream queen talent around, and was actually filmed in Aotearoa rather than the sunbaked Texas backwaters in which it’s set.
Nonetheless, with those opening fish-eye scenes of sweaty kids in a very TCM-esque van and entrepreneurial pornographer characters, X at least has a flavoursome independent spirit. And it has balls too, setting up nasty kills and a fairly profound villain at the same time with sleazy confidence.
See if you can guess who dies first, it’ll be fun: there’s producer Wayne (Shortland Street‘s Martin Henderson) and his wannabe starlet girlfriend Maxine (Mia Goth, serving us Shelley Duvall), lead actors Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow, acing the old school dirty movie overacting) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi a.k.a Kid Cudi), plus film school dweeb RJ (Owen Campbell) and his meek girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega). Initially nicknamed “church mouse”, she gradually digs the experimentation and empowerment on display, turning from pious final girl material to something more interesting—much to RJ’s hypocritical (and hilarious) horror.
The merry band of perverts aren’t made to feel very welcome at the farmhouse where they’re shooting “The Farmer’s Daughters”, with their wizened Christian hosts blaring televangelists and barely practicing gun control. After a long and hard (hehe) first day on set, Bobby-Lynne accurately explains away the haters: “We turn people on, and that scares ‘em.”
“They cain’t look away neither”, Maxine drawls, recalling a grisly roadside accident the gang witnessed on the way into the sticks. Their van, mischievously labelled ‘Plowing Service’ on its side, ground through chunks of a destroyed cow in that earlier scene: a squishy reminder that no matter how young and special and appealing we strive to be on the outside, we’re all made of the same rotting viscera within.
Cinematographer Eliot Rockett takes care to illuminate the victim’s outsides with voyeuristic glamour—it’s okay to stare—just as much as he casts grim shadows on Pearl and Howard, the repressed elderly couple who literally take up pitchforks to chase away the city-slickers. In the shallow world of X (and, let’s be real, in our world too), the most existentially repulsive concept imaginable is old people having sexual desire, daring to demand our erotic gaze.
Pearl is demonised for her lust, trapped in a rubbery mask of senility not too different from Leatherface’s mom-mask in the recent Chainsaw reboot. After one too many reminders of her age, she bitterly lashes out at the filmmakers, turning their dirty movie into a downright snuff film. What’s impressive is that we manage to feel sorry for her, even as she’s penetrating our heroes with knives and farm equipment as some old-school puritanical slut-shaming: her aching connection to the desired young stars, and Maxine in particular, may only become clear when the credits roll.
There are two especially well-timed scares where West dares us not to watch, as our heroes obliviously edge towards a slow-swimming gator and a pointy nail in the floorboards respectively. It’s a sick joy to feel your attention being manipulated so cruelly—and what are adult movies about anyways, if not the tenuous boundary between pleasure and pain, desire and shame?
In his very slow-moving scarers like The House of The Devil or The Innkeepers, West overemployed this tendency, often making horror fans wait upwards of an hour for any scares or gore or release of tension—genre money shots, let’s say. X is so heady and graphic right away that its audience is already fluffed for the violence to begin, and when it does, it really delivers, with a good blend of shocking sudden dispatches and creeping kills we can all see coming.
There’s a gut-deep thrill in being unable to look away, much like RJ reluctantly filming his innocent girlfriend’s screen debut. What are we encouraged to ogle, and what is ignored and forgotten? The meaty aftermath of shotgun blasts or a dangling penis’s silhouette might stay burned into your brain after seeing X, unless you’re too chicken and have to cover your virgin eyes. At least there’s a nice Fleetwood Mac singalong in the middle of the film, sandwiched between a whole lot of fleshy climaxes—both little deaths and big ones.
