Two strippers, a sleazy club owner, an aspiring film director, and his sound recordist girlfriend set out from a Houston shake joint in a van marked “Plowing Service.” They drive to an isolated Texas farm where they intend to shoot a porno movie. The farm’s owner is a creepy old man with a wife who stares at the city folk from an upstairs window.
If that scenario just screams “slasher movie” to you, you’re going to love X. Ti West seems to have set out to create the kind of movie Golan Globus Productions would buy based on a pitch and a poster and release in a double bill with Ninja III: The Domination. RJ (Owen Campbell), who serves as West’s alter ego, insists he can make a “good dirty movie.” That’s West’s attitude towards this audacious genre exercise. X is the inevitable moment when the “elevated horror” movement crashes into trash horror, and y’all, I’m here for it.
I always say that all you have to do to get a good review out of me is get the fundamentals right, and West, an indie film vet who has taken his lumps in the studio system, absolutely does that. X is shot through with bodyslam jump scares, but it’s also a work of great directorial elegance, such as the breathless scene in a darkened bedroom where West and cinematographer Eliot Rockett ratchet up the tension with a simple focus pull.
West is not shy about his influences. The opening title card announces that it’s 1979, the year of Alien, The Amityville Horror, Phantasm, and Abel Ferrara’s Driller Killer. RJ name-checks Psycho, then has a breakdown in a familiar-looking shower.
All slasher movies worth their salt need a great final girl, and X’s long windup is all about guessing which one of the three women it will be. Overt sexuality is always punished in slasher movies, so odds are it’s not going to be the brassy blonde porn star Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow). Maxine’s (Mia Goth) blue eye shadow and predilection for skinny dipping seem to mark her for a grisly death. That leaves Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) the wide-eyed sound girl as the obvious choice — at least until she asks to shoot a scene with veteran woodsman Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi aka Kid Cuti).
The answer is actually surprising. For even though X is a self-conscious genre exercise, it’s also a subversive deconstruction that has its own theories about why and how sex and violence intersect in this kind of horror film. But maybe extended discussion of the subtext (although is it really a subtext when the author keeps waving it in your face?) distracts from the questions that matter most to horror fans: Is it scary? Is it gory? Is it fun? Yes to all three. West has taken the familiar beats of VHS-era horror and smoothed them down like a producer crafting a perfect pop song. He knows that editing and sound design are the key to making a good scary movie. And it also helps that his cast, which include Goth playing two characters, is game for anything. X is an instant horror classic—a guilty pleasure you shouldn’t feel too guilty about.