X ⭐

Ti West’s X is a slasher horror movie that wants you to know that it understands themes and camera placement and building dread, but isn’t gonna let any of that stuff get in the way of showing the audience a good time. X is about six people in 1979 who venture out of Houston to an isolated farmhouse for a single terrifying night where most of them get turned into Spam-in-a-cabin. What separates them from your usual campers is that they’re not at the farmhouse just to drink and get laid, but also to film a porno movie, hence the title X.

Their reasons for being there allows Ti West, who wrote as well as directed, to add more depth to the characters than you might get in a slasher movie. And this works into the themes of youth, vitality, and opportunity, as well as aging and regret at becoming someone you no longer recognize. The killer also has more motivation than simple bloodlust, which allows the film to go to some creepy places apart from just the suspense and violence. The actors all rise to the material, allowed to invest their characters with varying moods and motivations, and all of them get to add touches of humor to the affair. Mia Goth especially gets to play a wide range for a slasher film.

This is a film from production and distribution company A24, which has previously released the horror movies Midsommar, Hereditary, and The VVitch, titles which have become synonymous with the phrase “elevated horror”, connoting an emphasis on discomfort and building dread over monsters and sudden violence. Is X an elevated horror film? No, decidedly not, but it knows how to speak their language.

The porno movie-within-a-horror-movie allows for these things to be discussed by the characters. The cameraman for the porno worries about his light and camera angles, and he expresses his belief that just because it’s a porno, it doesn’t mean it can’t be art. But the film producer is more concerned with the flesh and the action and giving audiences what they paid to see. Similarly, X begins with many lingering shots from interesting angles, slowly pushing in or panning to reveal details. These shots call attention to themselves, but are by no means ‘hacky’, working to establish a pace and mood. But there’s a point in the film where the mood-setting ends and they get down to dirty business.

It’s said that in the final, manic section of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz, no shot is longer than three seconds so as to match the action films he is mimicking. I need to watch X again to see if there is a comparable shift in shot length or set-up when the bodies start piling up. The tone shift is smooth and not jarring, and it’s not as large a shift as something like Malignant, but the movie realizes that it’s time to have some gory fun.

‘Fun’ is the right word, as the audience I saw it with was alternately gasping and howling as the ending unfolded. There’s a lot of humor throughout the movie, but the end has some good reversals and gory kills. Where an elevated horror film has the inevitable collapse into madness and despair, this is your recognizable slasher film ending where you are invested in who will survive and how.