Ti West’s Unlikely Horror Franchise

X, Pearl, and MaXXXine form a truly unexpected trilogy

If any subgenre of horror has become synonymous with long running franchises, it’s the slasher subgenre. There are thirteen Halloween movies, twelve Friday the 13th movies, nine A Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and six Scream movies (with a seventh in the works) just to name a few. Part of the reason for that is because they tend to follow a certain formula. There’s a bunch of attractive young people getting stalked and murdered by a killer before a Final Girl (who doesn’t partake of the sex and drugs of her murdered friends) defeats the killer at the end. The formulaic nature of these films makes them pretty easy for studios to churn out on small budgets that lead to them being very profitable. It can also mean that they aren’t always of the highest artistic quality. I’ve written about this in the past if you want a deeper dive into the history of the subgenre.

At the opposite end of the low-budget-profitable-horror spectrum sits independent auteur passion projects aimed at more niche audiences. Frequently dubbed “elevated horror” (a term I hate), they really began to rise in number and popularity in the mid-to-late-2010s with movies like Under the Skin, The Babadook, The Witch, and Hereditary. This increase coincided with the rise of distributors and production companies that specialized in these types of films. Chief among those companies is A24. Though A24 is nowhere near holding a monopoly on the market, it has become somewhat synonymous with indie art house horror after distributing and/or producing films such as Under the Skin, The Witch, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, and Hereditary just to name a few of their earlier films. What they are certainly not known for is producing entire franchises. That’s where Ti West comes in.

I first became aware of Ti West with 2009’s The House of the Devil. It’s a slow burning indie horror film set in the 1980s that relies on a mix of character driven storytelling (Barbie director Greta Gerwig even has a part in it) punctuated by moments of shocking violence. In other words, it’s the kind of movie that you would expect to come from A24 if it had been made five to ten years later. His subsequent horror films were a ghost movie called The Innkeepers (2011) and a found footage style movie inspired heavily by the Jonestown Massacre called The Sacrament (2013). I’m a fan of both. His next film was a Western called In a Valley of Violence (2016), and then he took a break from directing feature films. It was fascinating timing because it really felt like his style of filmmaking (especially horror filmmaking) was just starting to blossom. It felt to me like one of my favorite filmmakers was going to miss out on the recognition he deserved. Then seemingly out of nowhere, X hit cinemas in 2022.

X brought all of the aforementioned disparate elements together. It’s a slasher written and directed by Ti West and produced by A24. It’s set in 1979, and follows an adult film production taking place on a farm in rural Texas unbeknownst to the elderly couple who owns the property. Things do not go well for them. This was my favorite horror film of 2022. It’s a great story with excellent direction, it features a superstar performance by Mia Goth (playing two different characters), it has plenty of meta commentary on the film industry (and horror films in particular), and it’s soaked in blood with some truly gruesome kills. On top of all of that, it’s very funny as well. It was also very profitable. It made $15.1 million at the box office on only a $1 million budget. A good chunk of that budget was spent on building the farm set in New Zealand and making it look like rural Texas. With the sets already in place and COVID making it difficult to move around, West made an interesting pitch to A24: why not keep the sets in place and film a prequel to X while the cast and crew were still there? A24 was apparently hesitant to green light a prequel. A24 wasn’t really in the business of producing franchises, so this was a unique request. They also didn’t know yet if X would even turn a profit as this was all pitched prior to the film’s release. As West tells it, they declined to okay it without a script. That prompted West to collaborate with Goth (who would once again be playing the lead in this proposed prequel) to crank out a script in two weeks and present it to A24. A24 decided to go ahead and produce the film, and thus Pearl was born.

While it could also be considered a slasher, Pearl is a much different film than X. Set during the 1918 flu pandemic, it follows the titular character (played by Goth) as she tries to escape her mundane farm life by pursuing a dancing career that could grant her the fame and fortune she desires. As you might imagine, things do not go as planned. While Goth was excellent playing both aspiring adult film star Maxine and the elderly Pearl in X, Pearl is the film where she truly gets to shine. Pearl is utterly unhinged, but she’s also sympathetic. Goth is able to convey both with aplomb, and she delivers one of the best monologues I’ve ever seen towards the end of the film. The other unique twist when it comes to the presentation of the film is that it’s done in the bright and saccharine style of an old school Disney film. It combines the aesthetic of The Wizard of Oz with the macabre psychological character study of American Psycho (along with the gore and violence). It would end up hitting cinemas in September of 2022 (X had just been released in March of 2022) with similar critical and box office success. It ended up making $10.1 million in a $1 million budget. For those of you not keeping track, these two films combined to make over $25 million on a combined $2 million budget. These were very profitable films. With that kind of success, is it any wonder that A24 agreed to produce a third film in the series?

MaXXXine would become the third film in the X franchise when it hit the big screen this past Friday. Goth once again stars as the eponymous Maxine Minx who has become a successful adult film star when the film opens in Hollywood in 1985. She’s attempting to crossover into mainstream Hollywood by landing the leading role in a horror film. Unfortunately for her, a mysterious killer is lurking in the shadows killing those who are close to her. Ti West once again changes up the style for this entry by going with a mix of Italian giallo like Suspiria (coincidentally, Mia Goth appears in the 2018 remake), 1980s exploitation thrillers like Angel, and mid-1980s American slashers like Maniac Cop. This has been the most divisive film in the series among critics and fans, but I personally enjoyed it quite a bit. There is once again plenty of gore and dark humor throughout, and there are some outstanding performances from the stacked cast (Kevin Bacon and Giancarlo Esposito in particular are great). As with the previous two entries, Mia Goth is the star. This trilogy of films have demonstrated that she is a brilliant actress who will have plenty of opportunities going forward. I haven’t mentioned this up to this point, but Maxine Minx shatters the mold of what a Final Girl is in a slasher film. Instead of eschewing sex, drugs, and the spotlight, Maxine readily embraces all three. She’s a full blown porn star who manages to find time to snort line after line of cocaine while being pursued by violent killers. For Maxine, these bloodthirsty lunatics are merely obstacles in path to stardom that must be overcome. She will not accept a life she does not deserve, and what she deserves is being a movie star.

I have not been able to locate the budget for MaXXXine, but it is currently on track to have the biggest opening box office of any film in the X franchise with $6.7 million. A24 seems to have made the right choice by having this be the first true horror franchise in the company’s history, and Ti West certainly appears to have picked the right time and project to return to filmmaking. I would not be surprised to see this franchise keep on expanding after this.