‘X’ and the Horrors of Mortality

I will not accept a life I do not deserve.

Time robs us all blind in the end.

What exactly makes a story horrifying is an interesting question. Plenty of stories that aren’t really horror are horrifying, like Requiem for a Dream¹. Other stories have the bones of a horror story—the beats and tone—but aren’t horror, like “A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver. The precise it that makes something into a horror story is more than just blood and guts, although that, yes, sure. Is it the breakdown of the usual rules? Maybe. When Jack Torrance drops the mask and starts growling like an animal with an ax in his hands, you are definitely in a horror movie.

But it’s deeper and more fundamental than that: Every horror story is about our mortality, or a knock-on effect of our mortality, like our utter insignificance, or our absolute impotence, or the way life becomes a slalom of loss and grief the longer you live it, watching every person, cat, and sitcom you love pass on². In the end, every horror story is standing behind you whispering, you’re mortal, asshole and then laughing³. The rest of it is just noise: Imagining the precise way you will suffer on the way out, because, baby, we all do.

X presents a familiar set up for a horror film: A group of youngsters head out to a rural, creepy place to engage in shenanigans⁴, and are punished for said shenanigans. The film wears its Texas Chainsaw Massacre roots like a very large badge of honor, crossing over from homage to obvious reference about six minutes in, but it takes a pivot you almost don’t notice, and it elevates the whole enterprise. Because the whole damn movie is about how life is just losing everything, bit by bit. SPOILERS HO!

We're gonna be rich! Feel how hard my cock is!

At a certain point in your life, the “old man yells at clouds” meme stops being so funny.

The story in X is elegant enough: In 1979, a trio of scrappy sex workers (Bobby-Lynn, played by Brittany Snow, Maxine, played by Mia Goth, and Jackson played by <checks notes ... Kid Cudi?>), an ambitiously charming producer, Wayne (Martin Henderson), a pretentious filmmaker, RJ (Owen Campbell), and RJ’s girlfriend-cum-assistant, Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) set off in a van for a few days at an isolated farm. There they intend to film a pornographic movie called The Farmer’s Daughters that they believe will make them rich and famous the way films like Deep Throat or Behind the Green Door broke through to mainstream pop culture in the 1970s⁵. The farm is owned by an elderly couple, Howard (Stephen Ure) and his unwell wife Pearl (Mia Goth). And as it turns out, Pearl is a tad homicidal. Cue the red corn syrup!

X is shot and edited with some panache. You really do feel the 1979 fuzz on everything, and Ti West chooses some interesting compositions and camera angles—he likes framing things in doorways and windows, hiding information from the viewer until he’s ready to reveal it, which amps up the sense of unease well before anything overtly horrifying begins to happen⁶.

What really makes X work is the way it updates some old horror tropes, specifically those having to do with the old sex = death paradigm. Horror has classically been a pretty staid film genre—for all the blood and gore, sex is traditionally treated as a pretty good reason to be murdered in the horror filmverse⁷. Once upon a time you could predict who would die in a horror film based on who got laid. In our post-Scream world this isn’t as tried-and-true as it once was, but you still see a lot of weird moralizing in horror stories. In X, on the other hand, everyone is pretty much horndog, and just about everyone has sex at some point in the film.

In fact, the first guy to die in the story is the guy we don’t see having sex: RJ. Everyone else with more than five seconds of screen time, including the old murderous couple Pearl and Howard, are pretty much all about sex—sex is the economic, social, and romantic driver for every character in the film.

The duality of the Pearl/Maxine situation plays into this. Pearl is clearly set up as a vision of Maxine’s future, and this is the crux of the film. The fundamental question being asked is: What happens to someone who is valued either wholly or in part for their youth and sex appeal when they lose those things?

The Patriarchy

BFFs

Maxine and Pearl both experience being objectified, and learn that their value, at least in part, is due to their beauty and eroticism. Pearl has lost both, and Maxine is doomed to face the same fate eventually, just like everyone else. Howard is in the same boat, of course, and can be seen as a glimpse of Wayne’s future—a frail old man who’s afraid to have sex due to his bad heart⁸. The really interesting part here is how the film explores the differences between those fates.

Howard is old, yes, and certainly not attractive. And yet it doesn’t really inhibit his life—Pearl still wants him, still begs him to have sex with her. And while she is housebound, he is free to move about and do as he likes⁹. The stakes are different for men and women—if Wayne becomes Howard in a few decades, he’ll be fine¹⁰. If Maxine becomes Pearl, her fate is horrifying. When Lorraine strains her relationship by exhibiting curiosity about sex and the porn business, RJ freaks out and leaves her. Lorraine later makes it clear she still cares for RJ and wants to be with him, but he leaves in a snit, his ego bruised. She loses her boyfriend, while he could still have her if he wished.

Female sexuality is the real monster here. Female desire destroys RJ’s relationship, because he would prefer Lorraine the “churchmouse” remain naive so he can maintain dominance in the relationship—the moment she begins to learn things he loses his smug superiority and throws a tantrum, because on an instinctive level he worries that Lorraine becomes Maxine—assertive and determined—and eventually Pearl—hostile and dangerous¹¹.

Meanwhile loss is treated as a curve downward into oblivion. RJ experiences what might just be the first loss of his young life when Lorraine goes renegade and has sex with Jackson. Wayne is middle-aged—explicitly 42 years old¹²—and has experienced enough losses hat he’s solely focused on hitting the big time with the film in order to make up for those losses. Howard, the old man, has lost almost everything, and shuffles about impotently for much of the film. And of course, just about everyone loses their life.

But the ultimate message of the film is the cause of this loss is female experience and knowledge, and that is horrifying to men. It’s revealed towards the end of the story that Maxine is the runaway daughter of the fundamentalist preacher shown on TV screens throughout the film. She’s literally damned, but she won’t accept a life she doesn’t deserve, which implies she has glimpsed enough of the world to want more than her church and her family offered. And women knowing what they want and who set about getting it will pretty much be the most terrifying thing a lot of men can imagine. Because one minute you’re mocking your young, innocent girlfriend for being young and innocent, and the next she’s checking out the porn star with the enormous appendage and then eyeing you thoughtfully, as if suddenly realizing you’re not as smart, worldly, or skilled as she thought you were.

Lucky for me, I already know I am not smart, worldly, or skilled. Which means I am free to sit here wearing nothing but a bathrobe, eating deep fried Oreos, because who am I fooling? No one.

Next week: Downton Abbey and Villain Decay.

1. Or that time I ran out of beer on a really humid day. I’m still scarred.

2. This is the sort of inspirational writing I was born to produce. Now that I’ve set the tone, please spend the next hour hiding all the sharp objects and firearms in your house.

3. Up until a few years ago, I was pretty confident science! would cure death long before I got anywhere near it. Now I am not so sure. Is this what a mid-life crisis feels like? You’ll know if suddenly turn up on TiKTok, doing dances.

4. Sex. The shenanigans are always sex.

5. Is it hilarious that the film they think will make them famous is one of the hoariest old porn premises ever? It is.

6. More storytellers need to understand that true power comes with what you don’t show/tell an audience.

7. This was very comforting when I was a virginal adolescent. I wasn’t getting laid, but at least I wasn’t going to be murdered by a clown wielding a chainsaw (well, probably not going to be murdered by a clown with a chainsaw; this was Jersey City in the 1980s, after all, anything was possible).

8. Cheers to Martin Henderson for this bravery, though. Not everyone can pull this off:

9. Which is, apparently, to complain. To which I say: Same.

10. Fine is a relative term, of course. Would an elderly Wayne still enjoy male privilege? Yes! Would he also experience nose hairs of supernatural length? Also yes!

11. Also, old.

12. Much like the legendary anachronistic abs of Jack Pearson on This Is Us, Wayne’s abs in this film simply do not scream 1979. It was a simpler time when tough guys in movies looked more like Brian Dennehy than The Rock.