I enjoy all of the above, and if someone had told me that a contemporary filmmaker, on a modest budget, had simultaneously shot two movies set in the same dramatic universe that covered these genres while also mashing them up, I would have found this hard to believe. But here is writer-director Ti West and his team, notably the wonderful actress Mia Goth.
West’s slasher film X is about young pornographers running afoul of an ancient couple on a Texas farm in the late 1970s. Its prequel Pearl, set 60 years earlier during World War 1 (and another pandemic), is about the youth of the wizened antagonist Pearl whom we met in the first film. Both are gore movies, but they are also about the need to get ‘a ticket out’ to a better life; about what the passage of time can do to us; and the empowering thrill of performing for a camera and an audience.
And their aesthetics are so breathtakingly different, it’s hard to believe they were made at the same time, by the same crew. But the visual differences are vital to their depiction of the characters’ frames of mind, as well as a commentary on how the cinematic landscape changed over those decades.
X is shot in the gritty, desaturated style of 1970s B-horror (such as Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), complete with explicit sex scenes of the unselfconsciously raunchy teen-horror kind depicted right up to the Friday the 13th franchise.
Pearl, on the other hand, employs the dazzling look of the Hollywood musical just as it had started to employ colour stock, most notably with The Wizard of Oz. (Though this narrative is set much before the iconic Victor Fleming-directed 1939 film was made, there are thematic links or contrasts between the stories of Pearl – who, in one memorable scene, molests a scarecrow – and Dorothy.)
It is, first, about the desire to become one of those stars you see on the big screen. Only after that is it a horror movie about the birth of insanity in a young woman who realises she won’t get a ticket to that distant constellation.
For me, experiencing Pearl a few weeks after X brought added poignancy to the earlier film. When I watched X, I was already moved by the tender scenes between the old Pearl and her husband, their envy and resentment of the youngsters traipsing around their property.
But watching Pearl’s backstory gave everything a new layer: here is someone who might have become a marquee name in this exciting new medium, like Vicki Lester in A Star is Born. Instead she must live her life out in the boondocks, memories becoming dimmer, old photos mocking her. And now she has to see these brash, condescending young people showing off their bodies for a new type of movie camera, gaining temporary, underground celebrity through a smutty film.
So, what is the real horror of X and Pearl? The overtly gory scenes, eyeballs being yanked out with pliers, a rotting pig with maggots crawling over it? The killing of people with pitchforks, the cutting of their limbs in slow-motion, before throwing them to an alligator? All that counts, of course. But there is also the horror of wasted lives. Loneliness and discontentment have always been among the major subjects of horror.
‘I was young once too,’ says old Pearl to a young woman in X. ‘One day, we’re gonna be too old to fuck,’ says another character in the same film, making a case for enjoying their porno-movie-shoot. Between these two lines is an ocean of desolation and yearning, which gives these films much of their power.