Ti West’s new horror movie X is about a group of filmmakers shooting an adult film in rural Texas. When their elderly hosts discover what they’re really up to on their property, the cast and crew are forced to fight for their lives.
One may form some surface-level expectations for X based on that synopsis, but if you’ve seen the rest of West’s body of work, you know he consistently delivers uniquely creative and well-layered stories within the genre. So whatever you think you’ll get from X, it’s better off you prepare yourself for a lot more. With X gearing up for its March 13th world premiere at SXSW and March 18th theatrical release via A24, we got the chance to chat with West about his top priorities in bringing this story to screen.
It’s been about six years since the release of West’s last feature film, In a Valley of Violence. While he’s kept quite busy in the series sphere directing episodes of Tales from the Loop, Them, and more, he’s making his return to the feature format with an especially rich horror narrative that, yes, delivers some solid scares, but also serves as a celebration of the craft of moviemaking as well.
Through this story of Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow, Owen Campbell, and Scott Mescudi’s characters making an adult movie, X also functions as a narrative that highlights the great lengths one must go to to make a film. West explained:
“I have a great deal of reverence for cinema as an art form and a crazy thing that people go do, and I feel like less and less people grasp that than they used to because we’re so bombarded with content all the time. So I wanted to make a movie where the characters in the movie were making a movie to invite you in to kind of be charmed by what it takes to make a movie. And if I could do that, then I could also give the audience sort of a crash course in what I’m doing in the movie. And so if I could make something that really kind of put the craft of filmmaking into the story in a way that was charming and that would hopefully make people think, ‘Movies are cool,’ that seemed worthwhile to do to me because I sometimes feel I’m missing that.”
West could have chosen any decade to set the film, but the pursuit of this goal to make X a film that exuded reverence for cinema meant that the ideal period to set the story was the 1970s. West explained:
“Because the movie was going to be craft driven and filmmaking driven, I would say that the 1970s is probably as lauded of a time in American cinema as there is, and it’s a time where successful movies were also a little experimental and were oftentimes filmmaker driven and cinema driven. It just is the decade of that, so it made sense to me.”
West also noted that when he considered how the same story might play out in the modern day, it was “not interesting” and would likely just be “people on webcams.” He continued:
“If you were to logically take it to a place of, what if it was made today, you wouldn’t necessarily go to that place, you wouldn’t necessarily shoot it the way you did, it wouldn’t be as difficult for those characters. We would take a lot of the love of cinema out of it and it would become very much, ‘Get on this webcam and show something and we’re gonna make some money.’ And that, in many ways, was antithetical to what the movie was. There was a movie when I wrote this movie that people had in their head that they were terrified I could be making and then the movie that it actually is, and that was important to me that it be like, no, this is a fun and sort of charming movie, not a dark, nihilistic movie.”
So yes, X is a slasher film, but now we know it’s also a fun and charming film about what it takes to make a movie. But there’s even more to it than that. X’s horrors are also deeply rooted in the fear of aging. In an upcoming episode of Collider Ladies Night, Brittany Snow noted that that element of the film is what struck her most when she first read the script.
“That was one of my first conversations with Ti. I think our first call I said, ‘So, you did a movie about the fear of getting older. I feel that!’ I think everyone feels that. I have aging parents and I’m getting older, and there is always that fear of, am I doing enough? Am I living my life to its fullest potential? And I think the juxtaposition of these two groups of people, one at the beginning, one at the end and how that collides I think is something that nobody’s done in a horror movie before.”
Eager to hear more from West and the cast of X? Stay tuned! We’ll have our full conversation with West, Snow’s Collider Ladies Night interview, and also a paired interview with Snow, Goth, and Ortega for you just in time for X’s theatrical release on March 18th.