Horror film “X” in the cinema: The wild heart – culture

From above she looks like an X as she swims. The whole picture is green except for young Maxine, who is slowly moving towards the pier on the left edge of the picture. Only: Maxine is not alone in this green. With patient snake movements, a scaly thing comes closer and closer from the right. It should have caught up with the small X at the jetty. Warning, spoilers: it won’t come to that. Seconds before the crocodile can maul her, the naked Maxine pushes herself out of the swampy pond onto the jetty, not even noticing the predator on her back.

Although nothing happens is this scene one of the most exciting in the horror film “X”, and it sums up what director Ti West is doing with his audience here. Even the camera, flying high above the swampy pond into which Maxine first dipped a blue-painted toe before completely submerging, actually undermines the scene. The viewer expects to see the woman’s kicking legs or her haunted gaze. The scene promises violence, a predator that tears the young woman down. Since “Jaws” this is a primal scene of the horror film with clearly erotic undertones. However, West then only releases this tension with the naked body of his leading actress, without resorting to violence and thus unmasks the gaze of the viewers, who are not only interested in the tension in these scenes, but always also in the naked young woman. A nasty play on horror movie conventions and moviegoer expectations.

Threatened expectations, is that what the mysterious X in the title stands for? Perhaps. But it also stands for lead actress Maxine, played by Mia Goth, who has “the X factor”. At least that’s what her fiance, the film producer Wayne, who’s about twice her age, thinks and casts her as one of the leads in the porn he plans to shoot on a remote Texas farm. It’s 1979 and anything seems possible in the film business.

The horror film as open heart surgery

X also stands for X-Rated. This used to be the name given to films in American cinema that had not received youth ratings due to extreme depictions of sex or violence. And because the X is also a crossroads, West must have thought: sex or violence? Ah, why not both. And another meta level at the same time. Because similar to “The Cabin in the Woods”, only a little more subtle, he reveals the mechanisms of his own film, comments on it with ambiguous dialogues, ironically quotes the great role models and undermines with jump cuts like in French art house cinema of the Nouvelle Vague the genre conventions of horror films. Because he knows that the cinema is a dream machine, a place where dreams come true or at least almost come true and he plays with these wishes of his viewers and characters. The horror film as open heart surgery.

Said porn is supposed to make the wishes of everyone involved come true: Wayne dreams of big money, the student couple behind the camera of great art, the performer couple in front of the camera of shagging, and Maxine has an insatiable longing in her heart to finally become famous, “like all cool people”. At least for her actress Mia Goth, that could be true. Thanks to her, Maxine is one of the most emotionally complex characters that has ever been seen in a horror film. In addition, Goth also plays an almost absurd double role in “X”, about which nothing should be revealed at this point. Suffice it to say: It’s a wild heart, like Maxine’s, where love and violence can be two sides of the same thing, where horror is always aimed – and where Mia Goth really gets a beating here.

X, USA, New Zealand 2022 – Director and Script: Ti West. Camera: Eliot Rockett. Starring: Mia Goth, Jenna Ortega, Martin Henderson. Cape Light, 106 minutes. Theatrical release: May 19, 2022.