The flesh of the young and the dread of the old collide in X, a provocative, ideologically confusing, and pretentious slasher horror that takes on sex, death, and religion, yet has little to say about any of these subjects.
Sex and death are synonymous with the slasher film. From the 1978 horror classic Halloween onwards, movies about horny teens getting slaughtered by homicidal bogeymen after “doing the deed” have become common place in horror cinema.
X, written and directed by Ti West (The Inkeepers), attempts to rewrite some of these genre tropes by injecting murky modern-day sensibilities about sex (mainly porn) into a late 1970s-set feature that evokes the horror movies of that era, especially Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The result is a horror movie that while certainly creepy and provocative at times, stumbles from the pretentious pedestal this “elevated” horror film has propped itself upon.
Set in 1979, X focuses on a group of wannabe porn stars – Maxine (Mia Goth), Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), and Jackson (Kid Cudi) – who along with their sleazy producer/manager Wayne (Martin Henderson) head to a rural property in Texas where they plan to film a pornographic movie. Unbeknownst of their carnal activities are the owners of the property, the aged and decrepit Howard (Stephen Ure) and Pearl (also Mia Goth), who protest their guests’ X-rated behaviour by way of bloody murder.
Throughout X West cuts to a pastor preaching brimstone and hellfire about the sinful dangers of sex and drugs, and how “sexual deviants” should be snuffed from existence. West then suggests that this form of Christianity is motivation for the murderous rage befallen upon the films’ amateur porn stars, who are written and portrayed as cool and rebellious counter-culture studs that preach “love is love.”
Later, the prudish and somewhat religious member of the porno film crew Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) begs to take part in the on-screen fornicating, West shooting a close-up of Lorraine as she removes her crucifix before she “gets down”, all while wearing underwear with the label “Sunday” imprinted on the back. If there was any way to showcase a disdain for Christianity, that would be it.
It all falls under the tag of “elevated horror”, an annoyingly pretentious label that A42, the distributor of X, specialises in. West’s bid to present a highfalutin horror story about sexual morality, religious bigotry, and the trauma of ageing, fails to live up to its self-described genius, with strawman stereotyping in the form of its “old white religious people” villains lazy in its writing and performance.
West’s decision to have a group of coked-up amateur porn stars as the films sympathetic lambs to the slaughter is eye-rolling at best and morally dubious at worst, and really speaks to where society is at when the purveyors of smut are seen as saints rather than sinners. When the main protagonist of X, Maxine, repeatedly declares “I deserve to be a star!” you can hear the “you go girl!” from the back of the cinema. Now that is disturbing and horrific.
