Yet Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (X)

Alright, time for the Jenna Ortega half of this thing. Which, she's actually only a supporting character in this, oops. Look, I wasn't going to watch the Beetlejuice legacy sequel for this. Probably could have done a little Wednesday for it. Oh well. Look, even if she's not the focus and it doesn't end too well for her in the motion picture, I didn't know that going in. In fact, I didn't know much of anything going in except that this was a Ti West picture. We've covered his work twice thus far, first with The House Of The Devil and then technically in the first V/H/S movie. His segment was one of the better ones, it had a particular scare that used the found footage format well and a wild twist. Still had a man be shitty to a woman though, so not helping that particular film's vibes. So, again, no idea of what I was getting into when going into the movie X. What I got certainly was interesting, so let's jam with it a little.

I think I jumped the gun calling Abigail a slow burn of a movie, because this one really takes its time before delivering the gory goods. A full hour passes before the movie turns on its head, and it turns in a particularly interesting way. There's lots of particular bits of mirroring going on here, but the first I want to focus on is the narrative's attempt to elevate pornography into something cinematic and the movie's attempt to elevate a slasher into something cinematic. You can boil the narrative down to make it seem like just another trope-laden slasher. A bunch of horny folks go out to a farm to film a porno and then they get picked off by the elderly couple who owns the farm for being decadent sexhavers. That is quite the reductive boil, but there's a lot more going on here which causes one to perk up and pay attention. As I said, the cameraman of the porno is trying to elevate things with cinematic language and editing and whatnot to make it more than just a movie where people fuck and you get off to it. So too, then, is X doing more than just showing people who have fucked getting stabbed in the throat because well that's kinda what we do in the slasher movie. 

These old folks aren't killing these horny sexhavers because they dared transgress to have sex. It's not entirely about being puritanical and going THE BIBLE SAYS PREMARITAL SEX IS BAD, THEREFORE I CAN NOW WAVE ONE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS AND KILL, HAHAHAH!! or anything. There is an envy happening here, where they themselves still have a drive but are too old to do it, so when they see the younger crowd doing it, that bitterness leads to rage which leads to murders. There's a real attempt here to play with the trope of "IF YOU HAVE SEX IN THE HORROR MOVIE YOU FUCKING DIE", and I kind of like how it plays in this one. There is a thought to it, a thought beyond "the killer thinks the sexhavers are bad", and I do really like that. It's a thought that almost gives a little empathy and pity to the old people being withered away, and how they destroy the younger generation with their spite. The old guard eating the new alive. There is a bit of a puritanical angle in there as well, in some aspect, but what's interesting is how it's swallowed up at the end with Mia Goth's Maxine. 

The way the climax plays out feels to me like divine intervention did save Maxine, despite every puritanical trope trying to scream otherwise. She's a porn star, a cocaine fiend, and a sexhaver. Surely she must die, but no. She persists, because she is determined to be a star. Sheer grit and defiance gets her through at the end, and that's really something. I don't have too much more to say about X. It was a good little movie with a nice slow burn, and it takes a slasher trope and twists it just a little to say something fresh. Just don't watch it near other people, there's a lot of fucking in this movie with the porno makers. As I understand it, Ti West made some more movies about the people in this movie. Maybe next year. Maybe. For now, we're almost to the end. Just two left, kids. Halloween approaches.