X-Rated Indie Film and A24
Authors: Blackwood Gemma 
Published: August 2024

This article investigates the ways that Ti West’s X horror film series uses the premise of pre-Internet American porno filmmaking as a grimy yet cool marker of American independent cinematic authenticity. The trilogy – composed of X (2022), Pearl (2022), and MaXXXine (2024) – uses the slasher horror genre to examine the porn industry and the history of twentieth-century cinema, with a particular focus on the so-called “golden age” (1969–1984) of 35mm feature film American pornography (Paasonen and Saarenmaa). Arguably, in these films the slasher horror genre reflects conventions previously associated with pornography. West’s retrospective gaze on the American porn industry’s past – mostly centring on the trials and tribulations of adult film actress Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) – serves to invite nostalgic comparisons with more progressive times for American filmmaking, with the porn industry serving as a proxy for distinctive and fully independent film production. For example, the famed New Hollywood era in the 1960s/1970s becomes analogous to the era when pornography went mainstream in the 1970s, a time when notorious porno films such as Deep Throat (1972) and Debbie Does Dallas (1978) were able to obtain audience acclaim and even receive limited mainstream exhibition and distribution (Paasonen and Saarenmaa; Kleinhans 156). The mainstream and commercial legitimacy of porno films was seemingly sanctified through the acceptance of the “adult” section in the video store culture of the 1980s, which is dramatised effectively in third film MaXXXine. Yet at the same moment, the dramatic feature-length film of the 1970s disappeared as cheaply made and short form video pornography became the dominant new form (Kleinhans).
Ti West has noted the diversity of cinema that was available in the 1970s as a reason for setting X in this milieu:

a big part of this to me is that in the ’70s, there’s whatever Hollywood system there was, you also started to have a larger rise of exploitation and porn movies. You could make them without any relationship to the movie business whatsoever and there was an outlet to do that. In addition to that, it was the cusp of VHS showing up. (Kohn)

In many respects, these liberal shifts in the 1960s and 1970s for both industries can be considered offshoots of counter-cultural dreams about societal progressiveness, and in the X series pornography is used cleverly as a storytelling device that precipitates much of the violence and horror, through arguably through a derisive lens (and in the first two films, the primary pornographer creators, producers, and exhibitors all have their comeuppance). West’s focus on earlier forms of film pornography as being worthy of visual and narrative attention in his more “legitimate” form of auteur horror cinema doubly serves as a kind of taste-making exercise, serving to elevate the position of older porn films and historically locate them by revealing the cultural and stylistic innovations they enacted for American culture, especially as his films are themselves earning the “prestige horror” status given to other auteurs such as Jordan Poole and Ari Aster (Thompson). Indeed, I would even argue that the X series’ role of extolling earlier eras of cinema is key to the broader brand-building objectives of its producing film company A24 itself, which is centred around a David and Goliath myth of being the “cool’ underdog” within the movie business, doing things differently and having very good taste (Kampers 17). As Nate Jones suggested in his Vulture article about the rise of A24, the fandom that has been built for the company has taken on a cult-like fervour in contemporary culture.
Returning to film in 2020 after a seven-year hiatus directing for television, the announcement of Ti West’s new directing deal with A24 received critical attention from horror fans (Kroll). West had established a reputation as a horror director with the release of The Roost (2005), Trigger Man (2007), The House of the Devil (2009), Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009), The Innkeepers (2011), and The Sacrament (2013). The new films X and Pearl were filmed back to back and released six months apart: this was due to X’s New Zealand shoot and West’s decision to make the most of its farm set before its destruction. The willingness for A24 to support a sequel to the first film at the point of production demonstrates the studio’s trust in the filmmaker, as well as their ability to innovate. At this point it was highly unusual for A24 to greenlight a sequel film, as they wanted to differentiate from the economic logic of mainstream cinema with standalone films (Kampers).
The first film in the series X is set in 1979, following the story of a pornographic film production that travels from Houston to rural Texas for an on-location farm shoot. The country, American gothic setting of the deep south evokes rural horror films such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and certainly Alfred Hitchcock’s breakthrough thriller Psycho (1960), which is literally referenced by one of the characters, and poised its horror setting in a rural hamlet far from metropolitan surveillance mechanisms. When the porn actress Bobby-Lynne notes that her next stop will be Hollywood, the producer Wayne notes that “we don’t need Hollywood. These type of pictures turn regular folks into stars. We’re going to do it all ourselves”. In the era before reality television and the Internet, here the promise of fame and notoriety for “regular folks” that is these days linked with online and social media fame is enacted by the porno film – and perhaps even better than today’s online Web celebrity, the porno film of the 1970s offered the possibility of creating legitimate stardom, rather than short-term celebrity of temporary prominence.
The farm is owned by an old woman called Pearl with her husband Howard, and it soon becomes clear that porno shoot is not received well by the aged couple, who go on a sex-fuelled rampage. Eerily, Pearl resembles the older version of Maxine (both characters played by Mia Goth), and therefore plays a doppelgänger to the younger girl, which also explains why the young porn actress is ultimately able to defeat the older woman, as their kinship is recognised. At the end of the film, after the murders of the entire cast and crew, Maxine emerges as sole survivor of the massacre.
As Kohn has suggested, the film is a “doused in ample nostalgia for a grimier era of American cinema”. As a film à clef, the movie provides a commentary about the process of filmmaking, especially through the character of the porno director RJ. He notes about the film he plans to make, “I intend on experimenting a lot with the film’s editing. Giving it a certain sense of the avant-garde, like they’re doing in France”. In response, Bobby-Lynne suggests “you know, if you tilt the camera up … it’ll look like he’s using his cock”. The differing perspectives of RJ and Bobby-Lynne demonstrate the ways by which a film production can be imagined. While this example is about the pornographic gaze – and more specifically, the “money shot” – it can also be read as the difficult interplay between choosing aesthetics versus the film’s true commercial imperative. When RJ’s girlfriend chastises him for making a “smut” film, RJ responds that “it is possible to make a good dirty movie”. When Wayne praises him on the visual content that he’s seen, RJ suggests “that’s ‘cause I’m not treatin’ it like pornography, but as cinema”. The small, travelling film crew represent the optimism and inventiveness of mid-century American independent cinema.
The second film Pearl is an origin story and a prequel for the elderly “psychobiddy” character that we meet in X: this time it is 1918, an era of Spanish flu and the end of World War I. While the farm location is the same as in X, the earlier era and internalised perspective of the central character as a young woman shows the Texan landscape represented in a very different way, taking on the vivid colours and fantasy-like version of the country, akin to the reimagining of Kansas in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). In this era, Pearl is newly married, but her husband Howard is away at war, so she lives with her austere German parents: her father incapacitated with Spanish flu and her mother a domineering figure (reminiscent of the mother in Carrie, 1976).  Meanwhile, she dreams of escape, with a career as a dancer and movie actress her main fantasy.
Interestingly, Hollywood movies and pornographic cinema are both a feature of the prequel. The film theatre in the small town near her farm, originally a place of solace for Pearl as it let her escape from the difficulties of life, becomes a location for twinning desires – sexual appetite and fame – with the projectionist fulfilling a dual role as facilitator for both. She visits the movie theatre and watches a film called Palace Follies. Outside the theatre, a poster for Cleopatra (1917) is clearly displayed, showing its vampish star Theda Bara clearly (whom Pearl names her alligator after, potentially a reference to Bara’s Egyptian femme fatale status, a female who can cause much damage to the symbolic phallus). In the third film MaXXXine, we will find that Theda Bara’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is featured poignantly as well, mirroring Maxine’s dream of finding stardom herself. Pearl lets the projectionist know that she dreams of stardom and escape, with Hollywood the brand-new venue for such dreams.
In Pearl, pornographic cinema becomes a tipping point for the young woman’s loss of sanity. The projectionist plays her the stag film A Free Ride (1915) – acquired from France but made in the United States. Linda Williams writes that stag films are “anonymously made, short, undated silent films displaying one or more hard-core sex acts” (108), which flourished in underground circuits from the emergence of cinema until the late 1960s and the “golden age”, when the porn industry became more accessible and quasi-legitimate. According to the intertitle, the film is directed by “A. Wise Guy”, photographed by “Will B. Hard”, with titles by “Will She”. Sometimes known by the alternative name A Grass Sandwich, A Free Ride has an important status in the history of American cinema, as it is considered to be the oldest extant pornographic film made in the US (Slade). When Pearl asks the projectionist if the film is legal, he responds:

Filming it, no. Not here, anyway. It will be eventually. People would pay an arm and a leg to see this. Pictures like this are going to revolutionise the industry, and I for one, plan on capitalising early. It’s reality. There’s no denying we all share a fascination in seeing people as they truly are.

The stag film cements her relationship with the projectionist, whom she sleeps with after killing her mother. After their liaison, she will kill him when he approaches her house and the reality of her psychotic life at the farm. Evocative of Norman Bates in Psycho – a recurring aspect of all three films – part of Pearl’s psychosis comes from her internalised re-enactment of her own mother’s disgust and subsequent repudiation of sexual fulfillment. While she represses this drive, it becomes clear that her perverted sexual energy will continue to resurface, enabled by her husband.
Finally, the third film MaXXXine returns to the continuing story of Maxine Minx. Here, the porn starlet is living in Los Angeles and trying to switch from her widespread porn celebrity to “legitimate” stardom in mid-1980s Hollywood, as well as trying to forget about her bloody past. Her big break to transition into greater Hollywood stardom comes when she lands a role in a sequel horror film called “The Puritan II”. Interestingly, the female director of the film series, Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki), is also keen for more legitimate mainstream success for this film, especially trying to avoid the “video nasty” appellation that was being given to the first film. Maxine’s film “The Puritan II” will end up premiering in Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the epitome of legitimate Hollywood fame. She visits the Universal Studios lot – a salient site for the development of the horror genre in the 1930s – and she is stalked at the Norman Bates house from Psycho. The intertextual allusions to Psycho (1960) are also notable given the movie arguably set the scene for the slasher film in positioning the killer as the film’s protagonist, which would later become a core trait of the slasher film multi-sequel series. This time, the Hitchcockian film set – as the director notes, a set made for a recent sequel of the original film – becomes a reminder of Maxine’s past at the homestead in Texas, while the Hollywood film industry itself comes across as sordid through its uncaring treatment of young female starlets: arguably, another critique of the contemporary film industry as being formulaic and the “killer” of originality and innovation.
Utilising a neo noir thriller aesthetic in downtown Los Angeles – linking to films of the era such as Body Heat (1981), Body Double (1984), and To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) – the cinematography of MaXXXine literally shows the struggle playing out between the two types of film industries, with “XXX” theatres and peep shows jostled against larger film theatres (with brat-pack coming-of-age film St Elmo’s Fire (1985) on the mainstream cinema marquee). The video store – perhaps one of the most democratic film places to access both explicit and mainstream film – is another key cinematic space in the film, and it demonstrates the unlikely association that exists between these cinematic genres. Video is symbolic of how changing cinematic technologies would alter cinematic reception irrevocably. While home video expanded the market for pornographic film – as it opened the possibility for viewers to consume adult content in full privacy for the first time – it also spelt the end of the dominance of the feature film, and hence its link to the grandiose dream of stardom. This is why in MaXXXine the protagonist hustles to find an alternative route to stardom, which here eventually takes place through her sudden notoriety and celebrity caused by surviving the real-life attack of her father and his religious comrades.
Together, the three fun films of the X trilogy comprise a loose cultural history of twentieth-century cinematic pornography, stretching from the stag films of the early twentieth century to its new life in the home via video. This in turn creates a shadow history of the ways by which media technology helps to shape the tastes and desires of different periods. West uses the horror franchise to take a nostalgic lens onto porno, but it is predominantly used as a commentary for celebrating fluid, dynamic, and independent cinema, and genre movies that defy conventions and create alternative stars. Ultimately, this nostalgic and film-literate trilogy turns to the past to offer an alternative vision of contemporary cinema that may be characterised by bravery, innovation, and authenticity, which just happens to also link back to the broader brand objectives of A24 and their championing of new indie cinema.
References
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