At a moment when the studios are expensively rebooting and revisiting such genre warhorses as The Omen and The Exorcist, Ti West has reinvented the horror franchise for the Letterbox generation with the X trilogy.
X – a slasher flick from 2022 that leaned into The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Deep Throat – starred Mia Goth in dual roles, as an aspiring young porn star named Maxine, and an elderly woman named Pearl.
Pearl, a murderous musical-melodrama prequel set during the first World War, was released that same year.
Covid may have shut down many film sets, but when West and crew landed in New Zealand for X, the writer-director quickly persuaded his patrons at A24 studios to finance a back-to-back film and prequel shoot. West quickly co-wrote Pearl with Mia Goth to expand her character backstory. The paired films became the studio’s biggest box-office successes of that year, save for the Oscar-winning Everything, Everywhere All at Once. Both projects had a combined budget under $10 million.
It was a welcome twist of fate for West, who hadn’t made a movie since his Ethan Hawke-headlined western, In the Valley of Violence, in 2016, and who hadn’t made a horror film since 2013′s Jonestown-inspired found footage pseudo-doc, The Sacrifice.
“Every movie is two years of trauma,” says West, who built a replica of a small Texan town in Manawatū. “I’m working on it all the time. You have to really want to be doing this. I didn’t have any ideas I felt would be worth doing. I took a break. I was happy doing television. And then I started to think that horror movies had got soft. There was room for a slasher movie like X.
“And I thought: I’ll just write it and if it never gets made, it will be a little bit of a waste of time, but not that big of a deal. I thought about why I like movies and why I like making movies, and craft was a big part of it. I tried to write a movie that would reflect all of my interests. And hoped that those would be infectious. And then somehow here we are.”
MaXXXine picks up with Mia Goth’s character in sleazy mid-1980s Hollywood. She’s an adult movie star hoping to make it as “Final Girl” in a studio slasher film, The Puritan II, a flick directed by Elizabeth Debicki’s hard-bitten auteur. Back on the streets, Maxine’s buddies and associates are disappearing, possible victims of real-life LA serial killer The Night Stalker. Meantime, a scuzzy Southern detective (Kevin Bacon) has tracked Maxine from The Farmer’s Daughter, the porno she made during X, a production defined by multiple unsolved murders. It’s bad timing for her big break in what Debecki in a meta-moment calls a “B picture with A ideas!”
“The idea for X was to make a movie that would put craft on display,” says West. “Any period movie is very exciting for me. You can’t just show up some place and film. You have to decide every single thing that’s going to go in the frame, from props to clothes to signage, to the lenses you use. So everything becomes a big collaborative, creative, aesthetic process. We wrote that into Pearl but in a completely different way. And then we wrote it into MaXXXine in a different way. I had already made the other two movies. This wasn’t just a shift in stylistic aspects. We’re not on a farm with a handful of characters any more like we are in X and Pearl. We’re in a major city and we’re trying to make it look like the 1980s. It’s a much bigger scale.”
Judiciously selected footage of Dee Snider, the articulate frontman of Twisted Sister, appearing before Tipper Gore’s infamous 1985 PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center) Senate hearing, introduces the Satanic Panic into the fabric of MaXXXine. As the titular character arrives at the Hollywood studio, there are constant pickets from “concerned parents” protesting against horror films.
“The mid-’80s was such a crazy time for censorship, whether it had to do with music or movies,” says the writer-director. “Whether that’s the ‘moral majority’, the PMR, or the banning of video nasties in the UK, it’s something that was very much in the news and made it all the way up to the government. It’s strange to think that someone who’s in a band would have to go on trial to testify about how there’s not actually Satanic lyrics in their music. That felt like a ripe backdrop for MaXXXine.”
MaXXXine arrives as part of a wave of “elevated horror” or “art-horror” emerging from the achingly hip A24 imprint. The contentious marketing term, which emerged alongside such titles as Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar and Robert Eggers’s The Witch and The Lighthouse, has arguably lured an art-house crowd to a genre traditionally dismissed as disreputable. But the branding hasn’t helped during awards season.
Speaking in 2023, Mia Goth decried the “very political” shutout of Pearl at the Oscars; many commentators had expected Goth to be shortlisted by the Academy for her work on the film. There remains, too, a horror-adverse critical subculture, dating from Pauline’s Kael’s dismissal of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
“It’s funny when people look back on The Shining,” says West. “It’s such a different movie than the film reviewed when it came out. You wonder how they missed so much. Horror is still certainly seen as much less. It was one step above porn for a very long time. In fairness to The Shining, even though it didn’t do well when it came out, I don’t think people thought of it as that. But I think when people say, ‘Oh, I don’t like horror movies’ and then if you list say The Shining or The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby, they’ll say, ‘Not those, those are great’. And then you could go on with that list. What you mean is that you’ve seen a handful of bad horror movies in your life and you’ve decided they’re all that. That’s unfortunate because people miss out on some great filmmaking, performances and storytelling.”
Timon C West grew up in Delaware, where he and various chums watched videos and made early shorts using two VCRs to edit. At New York’s School of Visual Arts, visiting professor Kelly Reichardt, director of Certain Women and First Cow, introduced him to indie movie hyphenate Larry Fessenden. The latter was impressed enough to finance West’s early low-budget horror films, The Roost (2005) and Trigger Man (2007).
As an actor, he has appeared in such mumblecore productions as Adam Wingard’s You’re Next and Olvia Wilde’s Drinking Buddies. As a young director he found kindred spirits among the mumblecore movement, the same US indie growth spurt that produced Mark and Jay Duplass, Amy Seimetz, Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig. “When mumblecore happened – I think the term came from a New York Times article – it lumped a bunch of people together under a silly name,” says West. “I just met Joe Swanberg very recently at the premiere of MaXXXine. It’s an interesting thing. How many people from back then were making movies for $10,000? Myself included. And it’s so unlikely that they are still making movies but on a bigger scale. Greta could not be more successful. That’s pretty amazing.”
West has enjoyed fruitful collaborations with horror mogul Jason Blumhouse and Eli Roth. He worked on MTV’s Scream anthology, Fox’s Exorcist series and Amazon Prime’s Tales from the Loop. Last March he directed the music video for Justin Timberlake’s single No Angels. He has not always had an easy time in the corporate or franchise sector. He disowned the 2009 horror film Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever and unsuccessfully lobbied to have his name removed from the credits. He also bowed out of A Haunting in Georgia, the sequel to A Haunting in Connecticut.
“I’m always open to ideas,” says West. “But it would be rare where it would totally make sense. I’d have to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. It’s always more about the people I want to work with. Not some IP. I’m not anti-IP. But generally speaking, I like that I can write my own stuff. With IP, it’s a management thing. It’s more like what I do in television, which I enjoy doing. But with a movie, it would have to be a cool opportunity.”
He laughs: “And be worth the two years of trauma.”
MaXXXine is in cinemas from July 5th
