An X-traordinary Trilogy
Hi all, happy Friday! Today we are continuing what is shaping up to be a pretty damn fine splat summer with an analysis of Ti West’s X trilogy. It’s a little more recent than I normally do, but all three movies are masterful examples of summer horror that still manage to be their own distinct entities. I genuinely love this series so much, and I have so many thoughts I’m so excited to share with all of you! (P.S. Read all the way to the end for some exciting So Desensitized news!)
Before we get started, though, the horror community was rocked earlier this week by the tragic passing of Ozzy Osbourne. His farewell tour raised money for Parkinson’s disease research, which he himself suffered from. So this week’s charity is the Parkinson’s Foundation. Please donate if you are able. https://www.parkinson.org/?form=19983 Rest in power, Prince of Darkness.
The movies in the X trilogy in the order they were released in is as follows: X, Pearl, Maxxxine. The first is the original story, the second the prequel, the third, the sequel to the first. All three star Mia Goth, and are styled after various eras of film. The first, X, is stylistically very similar to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Set in 1979, X follows a group of young filmmakers who are making an x-rated film on the property of an elderly couple, Howard and Pearl, in middle of nowhere Texas. Pearl takes a bit of a liking to Maxine, the film’s final girl, while seeking to murder her co-stars, with the help of her husband. The aesthetic of this film is very summery, grainy, and old-fashioned, almost like it’s being shot through the same camera as they’re using to make their movie. Pearl, on the other hand, is set in 1918, and is very reminiscent (color and sound notwithstanding) of films of that time, specifically the follies, which Pearl desperately wants to be in. But, being a horror movie, there are also notes of old Universal Monsters movies, as well as the newsreels that would show before movies in the theaters. Finally, Maxxxine, set in 1985, is stylistically similar giallo films, which were popularized by Dario Argento in the late seventies and early eighties. They were very stylized, and colorful, more so than the typical eighties slasher. And none of these years are at all accidents, in terms of the way they are perfectly positioned to exemplify American culture at the time.
First, X. The year is 1979. The Tate/LaBianca murders are exactly ten years ago as of August. The hippie movement is just about dead in the water. Texas Chain Saw came out five years ago. Adult entertainment is starting to get popular in the wake of the ‘free love’ movement. Televangelists are also growing in popularity, playing off the wave of moralization that followed the ‘free love’ movement and the Tate/LaBianca murders. All of this must be taken into consideration while analyzing X. X, like Texas Chain Saw, tells the story of people stuck in time who will do anything to keep others stuck with them. Pearl, the main murderer of the couple that owns the farm, is played by Mia Goth, the same actress that plays Maxine Minx, the final girl. Pearl is stuck on the farm, and has been for her whole life, while Maxine gets to do whatever she wants. X shows a country divided between those who would rather the whole world stay in the past, in the world they grew up in, and those who are moving forward, no matter the cost.
Pearl is set in 1918, just before the end of World War One. Pearl is a German farmgirl in Texas, whose husband, Howard is overseas fighting in the war. Her father got the Spanish Flu and never recovered. And Pearl is stuck on the farm, caring for her father and working for her mother. All she wants is to be in the movies, the follies, with the girls dancing in a perfect line. And she will do whatever it takes to get there. Oh, and she kills animals when no one’s looking. As the movie progresses, Pearl’s violence escalates to pushing her mother into the fireplace during an explosive fight over dinner, stabbing the projectionist she’s been hooking up with with a pitchfork, smothering her father with a pillowcase, and even murdering her sister-in-law, who takes her to a dance audition that she sees as her last chance to get off the farm. It is very aesthetically reminiscent of the films that came out in the 1920s and 30s in reaction to World War One, and what returning soldiers brought home with them, despite being set actively during the war. Or, just maybe, because of it.
And finally, Maxxxine. 1985. The height of the satanic panic, and Maxine Minx has her big break in a movie called The Puritan 2, which is about a fifties housewife who becomes possessed by Satan. But as Maxine begins this job, what happened on that farm in Texas catches up to her, and a serial killer known as the Night Stalker goes on a killing spree, mostly focused on her friends, who are mostly sex workers. Like I said, this film is visually very similar to the Italian giallo style of film, which is very neon and colorful, like people tend to think of when they think eighties nostalgia. It is not directed, set dressed, or costumed to look like the typical eighties slasher, but instead, what people want to think of when they think eighties slasher.
Now, there’s a lot to unpack in all of that. First, all of these films are meant to show the darker parts of American culture and fear. At the end of the whimsically aesthetic van road trip to make your low-budget porn is an elderly couple who’ll kill you for it, because why should you get the chances they didn’t? Howard, like most soldiers, returns from the war haunted by horrors he can’t explain to a wife who has fallen apart in his absence, standing by a mockery of a perfect family dinner table that she has set with rotted food, and placed her parents’ corpses at the head of. Well, maybe most soldiers didn’t experience that last part. But they did come home to an America that was irrevocably changed, but trying to act like it was still the shining, perfect homeland it showed off in the pictures. And the Satanic Panic did more than just fearmonger about Dungeons & Dragons. It cost people their jobs, their sanity, their reputations, and, sometimes, their lives. Christian fundamentalism isn’t as harmless as it would like to make itself seem, and the X trilogy shows that time and time again. In fact, the most famous line in the entire series comes from a televangelist who makes a living preaching about the evils of sex, and turns out to be Maxine’s father, as well as the Night Stalker himself.
Christianity is a huge theme throughout the series. In X, it is not used as a justification for killing the filmmakers, but it hangs over the filming nonetheless, with Jenna Ortega’s character Lorraine starting off as a nice, Christian girl who is horrified by the proceedings, then eventually deciding that she wants a scene in the film herself. Right after which the killings start. Televangelist moralizing hangs over the whole movie like fog, with one of the first things you see being a TV still playing a sermon, with a background of blood splattered on a wall. It sets a pretty gruesome scene while establishing that in terms of both theme and violence, this movie is not going to pull any punches. This theme continues into Pearl, with her mother using religion to control both Pearl and her father, and Pearl using it to pray for God to get her off the farm and away from her family. Which - yeah. There’s a lot there. And, of course, Maxxxine is set during the Satanic Panic, with her starring in a film about Satan and the disrupted American nuclear family, which is also a huge theme throughout the series, and ties pretty perfectly into Christianity, which has often been used as a way to control women by forcing them to create those perfect families.
Pearl’s family is shattered by her father’s illness and her husband’s absence, as well as her inconsiderate and murderous nature, and the fact that she is sneaking out to cheat on her husband with the projectionist at the theater, which is the one place she can feel like it might be possible for her to get off the farm for good. Like in Texas Chain Saw, the filmmakers in X are exemplary of the shattered illusion of the nuclear family that followed the hippie movement, which is part of why Howard and Pearl want them dead so badly, because they are exactly like Pearl was, and the way she was destroyed their family completely forever. Their ideas of ‘free love’ are like what lead Pearl to sleep with the projectionist, which, while it wasn’t the worst thing she did to her family, sure didn’t help anything. Maxine also successfully ran away from her family, like Pearl longed to do for so long, and so to Pearl, she is her own failure personified. Maxine’s own father tries to kill her in an ‘exorcism’ for his documentary that is meant to expose the satanic evils of Hollywood, because it took her from him. In fact, Maxine’s first shot at stardom was at her father’s church when she was just a little girl, which she loved until she learned how it was built to keep her exactly where she was.
The X trilogy is, in short, a brilliant examination of the ways Christian fundamentalism and twisted ideas of what the perfect American family should look like have warped the way America sees itself, as well as the way it treats itself in media. Because, really, every of those movies is about a movie. Maxine and her friends are shooting a porn film, because they are the children of the ‘free love’ movement, and believe that they should be able to do whatever they want with themselves without anyone punishing them for it. Pearl wants to dance in the follies, because it means she can be beautiful and free, perfect, not damaged like she is. And Maxine is a star in the biggest horror movie of the summer, which is itself a critique of the American nuclear family that wasn’t. The references to other pieces of media with these same themes in each movie adds further layers to these overarching themes of American culture. The song Oui, oui, Marie, which appears in both X and Pearl, is about the violence of love during the war. The follies Pearl wants to be in so badly are accompanied always by a newsreel that details the horrors of war. Pearl and Maxine being played by the same actress is a sort of Lynchian move that shows that they are, fundamentally, one and the same. But Maxine gets out, while Pearl spends the rest of her life on the farm, eventually having her head run over by her own truck, driven by Maxine on her way to the freedom Pearl never got. Even the appearance of the Bates Motel from Psycho in Maxxxine, and the fact that she hides in it when the private eye sent to find her and uncover her past adds yet another layer to the idea of the post World War One psyche of America, one that needs to cling to the idea of the perfect, wholesome American family, but can’t acknowledge that it doesn’t exist and never did.
So as Pearl grimaces painfully at the camera, holding a pitcher of lemonade in her house that she has made of rot and death, and Maxine takes Howard’s truck to drive off into the sunset having survived what the newspapers will call ‘The Texas Porn Star Massacre’ and the camera pans up from the lifecast of Maxine’s housewife character’s disembodied head to the Hollywood sign and all the way to the stars, we, the audience sit and watch, strangely inspired. Because after all the blood and gore and, the trauma and the fear, she made it. In the end, Maxine became the star she always knew herself to be, despite it all. She will not accept a life that she does not deserve. And neither will we.
Thanks for reading, all! I hope you enjoyed, and that I managed to communicate my various points clearly enough! So, next week will mark two months until this years Spooky Season Spooktacular, the theme of which will be decided by you, my spooky readers. On August first (mark y’alls calenders!) I will be going live on Instagram to talk about each of the options and what they entail, while doing some spooky baking. Later that day, I’ll post an official poll and you will all vote because you don’t want to force me to make this decision by myself again <3. So I’ll see you all then, then a week later for our next splat summer post! Happy reading and stay spooky!🌟🎥🪓🩸❤️