Movie Review : X (2022)
Outside of Michael Myers, Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees, slasher cinema never really quite took off as a subgenre of horror movies. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of films made. No one captured the essence of the genre like these three for one simple reason : it wasn't the character that made it effective, but what he represented and what slashers represent is long dead: America's fear for horny young people’s soul. Slashers were also dead until some guy named Ti West resurrected them with a movie simply titled X.
X starts at very conventional place : a group of young adults in 1979 rent a cabin in rural Texas to shoot a porn movie. The old man leasing the place (Stephen Ure) doesn't seem to like them much and he's got a loopy wife named Pearl (Mia Goth) who smells the sex off the kids, which awakens all sorts of horny buried memories. The shooting is well underway when Maxine (also played by Mia Goth) stumbles upon old Pearl at a nearby pond and while their interaction seems sweet and harmless enough, it is anything but.
Inverted Slasher
I was surprised by how good X was. It works so well because it is a very, very smart movie that inverts the working logic of slasher movies. By that, I mean the boogeyman doesn't represent a social fear about the future. It represents an existential fear of the upcoming generation. Namely, the fear of getting old, impotent and eventually dead. If X hits so hard in 2022, it's because it's a fear younger generations of any era share. That fear is also shared by actual old people who have to watch themselves wither away.
Everyone is equally victim of a fatality of human existence in X, but the porn crew are even more victimized for two reasons : 1) They're the ones actually getting killed and 2) There's a decrepit murderous sex ghouls strutting around the domain, begging whoever she finds to give her one last orgasm. But it's difficult to deny the humanity in Howard and Pearl who are just as terrified and confused at the porn crew is. They are facing the reaper in more imminent ways than a bunch of sex-crazed kids are.
That's the main triumph of this movie. There is a killer, but there's no slasher in the conventional sense of the term. No supernatural entity, going door-to-door collecting lives like taxes. Death circles every character in the same way, like some sort of inevitable frenzy leading people who were unlikely to ever meet on another into murderous confrontation. Because of that, X is both self-admittedly campy and somewhat tragic at the same time. It has an identity of its own unlike most contemporary slashers.
The Art of Gore
One thing that annoys me in slasher films is how joyfully dismissive they are to their own violence. Since murders are expected, what only matters is how violent and creative the killing will get and if you're not anticipating the killing with a little itsy bitsty tiny bit of fear in your guts, are you really watching a horror movie? Ti West seems to understand my concerns with slasher gore and offers a really cool, new perspective on it that feel infinitely more confronting and interesting than his contemporaries.
For example, the first on screen murder does not emphasize the wounds on the victim, but on the killer's face which is gradually losing its humanity and entering a state of wordless transcendence with every stab. The over-the-top lighting makes it even scarier. Killing in X has weight. Some of the murders are throwbacks to slasher history, but most of them have stakes and purpose. It feels fresh and unpredictable, like it did when unsuspecting audiences did when they first seen Halloween in theatre.
*
I know there's a prequel to X that was just released and that it might completely fuck up my argument about Pearl, but I don't care. X was a fantastic film and you should totally go into it blind. It is very much a step-by-step slasher in the most conventional sense of the term in its execution, but a complete philosophical reinvention of the genre nonetheless. Apparently Ti West has been terrifying people for close to 15 years now, but he's just gotten on my radar in the best possible way. I would watch this over and over.
