There's a moment near the start of X where a sheriff looks out at a blood-soaked crime scene and mutters that it looks like "one goddamned fucked up horror picture." He's talking about what happened on a remote Texas farm. But Ti West is clearly winking at you. Because that's exactly what you just paid to watch — and you loved every second of it.
X (2022) is a slasher movie about people making a dirty movie. It's also a film-school thesis on cinema disguised as grindhouse trash. It stars a 29-year-old British actress playing both the young final girl AND the ancient killer through six hours of daily prosthetics. It was filmed in New Zealand during COVID with an Avatar crew. And it secretly spawned a prequel before anyone even knew it existed. This movie shouldn't work. And yet it absolutely, unquestionably does.
The Setup: A Dirty Movie Inside a Horror Movie
It's 1979. A beat-up van rolls down a dusty Texas highway carrying a group of people with big dreams and terrible judgment. Wayne is the producer — fast-talking, dollar-sign-eyed, convinced he's going to strike it rich on the booming VHS adult film market. His younger girlfriend, Maxine, wants to be a star and isn't shy about saying so. Then there's Bobby-Lynne, a confident veteran of the adult film world who brings the best comedic energy in the movie. Jackson Hole, the smooth Vietnam vet who also happens to play guitar. RJ, the wannabe filmmaker who insists they're making "art." And Lorraine, RJ's quiet girlfriend who runs the boom mic and has never once questioned her own desires — until now.
They're heading to a remote farmhouse to shoot their film, The Farmer's Daughters, without telling the elderly owners exactly what kind of movie they're making. Smart plan, guys.
The farm belongs to Howard and Pearl — a deeply unsettling elderly couple who already give off very bad vibes from the moment the van pulls up. Howard is cold and hostile. Pearl is something else entirely. She watches the crew from the shadows. Stares through barn windows. There's a hunger in her that the movie lets build slowly, quietly, and then — all at once — catastrophically.
What Goes Wrong (Basically Everything)
Once the cameras start rolling inside the boarding house, the movie splits into two tracks that run side by side until they collide in the worst possible way.
Track one: Pearl. She watches Maxine perform through a high window in the barn, and something inside her cracks. Not out of disgust — out of envy. Pearl was young once. She had desires. Now she's old and invisible, and her husband's failing heart means she can't even find comfort with him. The rejection tips her over into something dark and murderous.
Track two: the crew falling apart. RJ, who wanted to make transcendent cinema, watches his girlfriend Lorraine demand to be put in the film — and then shoot a scene with Jackson. His artistic vision collapses. He decides to leave in the middle of the night. That's when Pearl steps out of the darkness and stabs him to death with a pitchfork.
From there, the kills come fast and brutal. Wayne goes looking for RJ, wanders into the barn, and gets a pitchfork through the eyes. Jackson — the capable, combat-trained Vietnam vet — barely gets a chance to fight back before Howard pulls out a shotgun. Bobby-Lynne wanders near the lake, and the alligator that the movie very deliberately showed you earlier finally gets its payoff in spectacular, gory fashion. Lorraine finds the basement, gets locked inside, discovers a decomposing body hanging from the ceiling, escapes, and gets shot on the front porch.
And then there's Maxine. The final girl. She hides under a bed while Howard and Pearl — aroused by their own bloodshed — attempt to have sex above her. She escapes. She fights. Howard's heart finally gives out during the struggle. And then Pearl comes for her with a shotgun, completely unraveled, desperate to take Maxine's youth for herself in the only way she has left.
Maxine's answer is to hotwire the van, aim it at Pearl's head, and drive.
She snorts a line of cocaine and says, "Praise the fuckin' Lord," and drives off into the sunrise. It's triumphant. It's filthy. It's perfect.
Behind the Screams: Making a 70s Slasher in a Pandemic
Here's where the behind-the-scenes story gets genuinely wild. X was shot in Fordell and Whanganui, New Zealand, in early 2021 — not Texas. Director Ti West made that call because New Zealand's COVID protocols were among the strictest in the world. Once the cast and crew cleared a two-week isolation period, they were essentially in a production bubble where they could actually work without constant shutdowns.
West also hired local crew who were on break from filming Avatar: The Way of Water for James Cameron. So the people helping shoot this micro-budget slasher had just been working on one of the most expensive films ever made. That's a fun sentence.
The biggest technical mountain was aging Mia Goth — who plays both Maxine and the elderly Pearl — into a convincing 80-something killer. West brought in Wētā Workshop, the effects house behind The Lord of the Rings, to handle the transformation. Hair and makeup designer Sarah Rubano oversaw a process that required Goth to sit in the chair for over six hours every single day while up to thirty individual prosthetic pieces were applied, including full-arm appliances. To get shots where both Maxine and Pearl appear on screen together, a body double went through the exact same six-hour process to stand in for Goth during over-the-shoulder shots.
On the other end of the budget spectrum, the alligator was a practical foam-and-fiberglass prop built in multiple versions — one for towing through water, one styled like the Jaws shark puppet, and a standalone tail for splash shots. Brittany Snow actually did physical rehearsals being rolled and thrashed by the mechanical prop, which she described as having very hard, painful teeth. She's a Florida native, so she said dying by alligator was basically the most honest way she could go out.
Cinematographer Eliot Rockett, who'd previously worked with West on The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, helped nail the retro look through old-school techniques: split screens, wipe transitions, overhead tracking shots. The film-within-a-film segments use a different aspect ratio — grainy and constrained — to separate the reality of the story from the footage being shot inside it. Even the televangelist on the farmhouse TV gets his own boxy 4:3 frame, making him look like a relic from another era. Because that's exactly what he represents.
For the score, West paired horror-scoring veteran Tyler Bates with gothic neo-folk artist Chelsea Wolfe and told them to aim for something between the dread of Rosemary's Baby and the sleazy groove of Debbie Does Dallas. Wolfe, who has experienced sleep paralysis and night terrors since childhood, channeled that into the score's more ethereal, unsettling moments. Bates brought the "wakka-wakka" guitars and organic synths that give the violence its greasy, 70s grindhouse pulse.
What It's Really About
Look, you can watch X as a fun, brutal slasher and have a perfectly great time. But Ti West buried so many layers of meaning in this thing that it almost feels unfair.
The most obvious one is the meta-commentary on cinema itself. RJ wants to make transcendent art. Wayne wants to make money. Their fight is the entire history of Hollywood in miniature. And by putting this debate inside a horror movie, West is essentially turning the camera on the audience. When the sheriff at the start calls the crime scene a "fucked up horror picture," he's talking about the actual film you're watching. The movie is asking: why are you here? What are you getting out of this? Is it the art, the thrill, or the blood?
Then there's the aging theme, which hits harder than you'd expect from a movie this visceral. Pearl isn't just a monster — she's a woman who society stopped seeing. Her rage is built entirely from grief over her own fading youth, from a world that told her she only had value when she was beautiful and desired. The moment she reaches out to touch Maxine's face — their reflections split by a wooden beam, the older woman trying to reach across an uncrossable gap — is genuinely heartbreaking. West frames her as a villain, yes. But he also makes sure you understand exactly why.
The movie is also set in 1979 for a reason. That year sits right at the edge of the culture wars — the sexual revolution of the 70s crashing into the conservative backlash of the Reagan 80s. The porn crew represents the former. Howard and Pearl represent the latter. The televangelist on TV is literally Maxine's estranged father, which means her entire story is about escaping the shame of her upbringing. When she crushes Pearl's head and drives away, she's not just surviving a slasher — she's rejecting the ideology that tried to define her.
The Verdict: Horror's Best Surprise of 2022
X was made for about one million dollars. It made over fifteen million dollars at the box office. It currently sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. By any measure, that's a massive win — not just for Ti West, but for the idea that low-budget horror can still clear the room.
Critics loved it. Mia Goth was widely called the best thing in it (which, given her double role, means she was competing against herself and still won). West was praised for pulling off the rare trick of making something that works simultaneously as lowbrow grindhouse fun AND as serious, thematically loaded filmmaking. The comparison to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — its most obvious influence — went in X's favor almost universally. When Netflix released an official Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot the same year, the consensus was that West's film captured the gritty, political spirit of the original far better than the movie that actually owned the name.
The one debate the film kicked off involved its depiction of elderly bodies. Some critics felt that using Pearl and Howard's physicality as a source of horror crossed into ageism — that treating older people's desires as inherently disgusting undermined the film's otherwise sex-positive message. Others argued the discomfort was exactly the point: that West was holding a mirror up to the audience's biases and asking why we find old people wanting things so threatening. It's a fair argument to have. The fact that it's worth having says a lot about what kind of movie X is.
Horror Fan Corner: The Details Worth Knowing
The mystery body in the basement is a great example of X's confidence as a film. Lorraine finds a decomposing naked body hanging from the ceiling, and the movie never stops to explain who it is. But early in the film, there's a half-submerged Volkswagen Beetle in the swamp near the property. The implication is that Howard and Pearl have been luring travelers to their boarding house for years. The film crew isn't their first rodeo — they're just their latest victims.
The alligator sequence is basically a textbook lesson in Alfred Hitchcock's "bomb under the table" theory. Early in the movie, Maxine swims in the lake while an alligator stalks her just beneath the surface. She gets out without ever knowing how close she came to dying. West shows you the threat, lets you sit with it, and then lets you watch helplessly as Bobby-Lynne — who doesn't know any of this — wanders down to the water. By the time the alligator strikes, you're not just watching a kill. You're watching a ticking clock finally go off.
And the biggest behind-the-scenes secret: X and its prequel Pearl were filmed at the same time. West and Goth wrote the script for Pearl while locked in their two-week COVID quarantine hotel before production started on X. They shot both films back to back on the same New Zealand farmhouse sets. Audiences who stayed through the credits of X in theaters got blindsided by a full teaser for Pearl — a film that already existed and that nobody knew about. The horror community lost its mind. That guerilla move helped greenlight a third film, MaXXXine (2024), giving Ti West an entire decade-spanning horror trilogy built on one bold, low-budget swing.
Final Thoughts
X is the kind of movie that makes you feel good about being a horror fan. It's not just a well-made slasher — it's a film that treats the audience like adults, buries ideas inside the carnage, and does it all with a genuine love for the genre it's working in. Mia Goth gives two completely different performances in the same movie and makes both of them feel real. Ti West makes a movie that's as interested in what cinema IS as it is in making you jump.
The fear of getting old, the shame around desire, the fight between art and commerce, the way society renders people invisible — it's all in there, underneath the blood and the alligator and the crushed head. That's the thing about X. You think you're watching sleazy grindhouse trash, and then you realize Ti West has been talking to you the whole time.
We covered X on The THING about Films — go give it a listen if you want to hear us lose our minds over it together.