X (2022): As You Are Now, So I Once Was, As I Am Now, So You Will Be

Boy. I am just on a heater right now - the last four films I've watched have run the gamut from surprisingly good to downright excellent, and anytime that happens I just start thinking that my luck is going to run out and the next thing I watch is going to be a disappointment. It’s a fallacy, sure, but if you watch enough mediocre-to-crummy horror movies, you start to forget that there are also a lot of really good horror films out there as well, and X is no exception. It’s a love letter to horror film that is creepy, tense, and much smarter than you expect, as well as a striking, almost confrontational examination of aging and loss and desire.

It's Houston, Texas in 1979, and the film opens on a long, slow shot of a farmhouse baking under the noonday sun. The camera sits on this farmhouse for an uncomfortably long time. Eventually, a police car pulls up, and a sheriff and his deputy get out. We get closer to the farmhouse, and we see it’s a scene of carnage. There’s a body lying in the road with a bloodstained sheet covering it. There’s another huge swath of dried blood leading out of the gaping front door. There’s a hatchet buried in the porch next to the door. There are more bodies, and the deputy needs for the sheriff to see something that’s in the basement, something we don’t see but which obviously horrifies the two of them.

Cut to 24 hours earlier,  and a young woman sitting in front of a dressing room mirror, snorting cocaine and reassuring herself that she’s a “goddamn sex symbol.” She’s Maxine, and she’s part of one of three couples who are headed out of town for the weekend to shoot what might euphemistically be referred to as an “adult film” at a rural location. It’s Maxine, her boyfriend Wayne, who is producing the whole thing, Bobbie-Lynne and Jackson, who are - along with Maxine - the talent. Then there’s RJ, a cameraman who aspires to turn pornography into art, and his girlfriend Lorraine, who’s running sound and seems pretty uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Wayne’s found an elderly couple named Howard and Pearl. They have a guest house on their farm, and bills that need to get paid. Wayne’s paid them cold, hard cash for the use of it without bothering to tell them that it’s going to be used to film a movie called “Farmer’s Daughter.” Howard’s a dour fellow, spends his days sitting in front of the television watching the same evangelist preach the same sermon about kidnappers and sex fiends who live among us over and over again. And he’s adamant that Pearl not be disturbed by any goings-on. Pearl isn’t well.

Meanwhile, a figure’s watching everything from an upstairs window.

Given the setting (1970s Texas) and the premise (a bunch of young people shooting a pornographic film  on some potentially unstable farmer’s land), it’s easy to think that it’s going to be a retro grindhouse pastiche. It’s all there – sex, violence, dubious clothing and hair choices.  But it isn’t that, exactly. It takes a premise absolutely at home in 70s grindhouse horror and neatly subverts a lot of the expectations you’d bring to that type of film. To start, it’s a lot less gonzo than you’d expect. The pacing is extremely deliberate, almost meditative, for most of its running time. In lesser hands this would make it drag, but here the effect is more one of discomfort and building tension. The opening shot sets the tone – long, slow shots that don’t cut away when you expect them to, like a person who holds your gaze a little longer than you’d like. It’s not afraid to spend time on conversations between the characters without much else happening. There’s a dreaminess to it that is the antithesis of the 70s grindhouse picture. And just as it is often a slow, dreamy film, it is also often a quiet film. The score is minimal, consisting of some near-ambient ethereal singing and music from the period, but there are long…again, uncomfortably long…stretches with no score at all, and the silence brings its own discomfort.

It’s also very aware of itself as a film, and I don’t mean that it’s self-aware or self-referential in the way something like Scream is. It’s a film that isn’t afraid to use all kinds of different cinematic techniques to tell its story, whether they’re things you’d expect to see in a 70s horror film or not. It uses period-appropriate techniques like screen wipes and split-screen to very good effect, but it’s also not afraid to use long aerial shots, cross-cutting and matching action to draw connections between characters and provide ironic counterpoint. It’s not a funny film, per se, but it is a cinematically witty film. Events and dialogue are echoed across different contexts in ways that reinforce the larger themes and create small but important revelations late in the film. It’s even got an honest-to-goodness Chekhov’s gun that pays off at exactly the right moment in exactly the right way. Very little is wasted in this film narratively, and on that level the whole thing ticks along like a very well-made watch. And all of this is also in service to something that feels like a love letter to horror film in general - there are cheeky little allusions to Psycho, Jaws, The Shining, and found-footage horror films, and it’s a film that’s in conversation with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to such an extent that I could (and will) write an entire post just on that. The end result feels like something that’s talking to those films without attempting to slavishly copy them. It’s as much a film about film as it is a horror film, and the degree to which it engages both viscerally and intellectually without sacrificing one for the other is impressive.

Alongside very smart filmmaking uncharacteristic of the form is a fairly strong thematic concern with aging and the grief that comes with age - grieving the loss of what you once had, grieving the loss of what was never to be – as well as how age intersects with needs and desires. You have the horny teenagers obligate to the style, sure, but they’re aware that their youth and vitality is finite, and they want to celebrate it while they still have it. As Bobbie-Lynne puts it at one point, “one day we’ll be too old to fuck,” and this is seen as a reason to enjoy it while they have it. They relish living life on their own terms and seem perfectly comfortable with themselves. And that line can seem like a throwaway line intended to establish them as young, libidinous and uninhibited, but as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that it’s central to the conceit. It’s the pin that gets pulled from the grenade, as Howard and Pearl, who’ve seen two wars, now spend their days sitting in front of a TV blaring religious programming, their own vibrant youth relegated to dusty photographs on dustier walls.

And so you have the uptight older couple who most certainly would disapprove of what’s going on in the guest house on their property, and there’s the hellfire and damnation angle, but it’s not really about God. It’s not about where we go after we die, whether to heaven or hell. It’s about what we don’t have here on Earth anymore. It’s not puritanism, it’s resentment. Howard and Pearl were once young too, and they have an acute sense of what they’ve lost with age. It’s a sentiment even echoed among the protagonists, as when Wayne tries to counsel a riled RJ by saying in effect, “I’m 42 now, but I remember being 23.” Age creates divides, the field between the farmhouse and the guest house might as well be an ocean. But here’s the thing: Just because you stop being young, it doesn’t mean you stop wanting to be desired. It doesn’t mean you don’t want to be wanted anymore. It might be going a little far to say that the antagonists are sympathetic, but they’re not wholly unsympathetic either, and there are moments where the film confronts this in ways that again in lesser hands would be mere grotesquerie, but here are instead almost startlingly vulnerable. It’s a horror film, yes, but it’s also achingly sad.

And on top of all of that - the narrative precision, the genre subversion and affection, the examination of the human experience - it’s a damn solid horror film. The slow, deliberate pacing works as well as it does because things start getting creepy early on, very much in the “no, don’t turn around” school of slow-burn menace to start, with unexpected figures in the frame creating moments that are startling without being jump-scares and drawn-out sequences that are fake-outs as often as not. Then it’s around the halfway point when the other shoe drops, and here it shifts to something closer to the grindhouse horror tradition from which it emerged, as the story of the bloody aftermath from the film’s opening ultimately gets told. But even here its palette is broader than usual. Some moments owes more to the theatrical, operatic violence of giallo films than to early slasher movies and in others, death comes startlingly fast without lingering, climaxing on a note as pulpy and gruesome as anyone who came to this expecting The Boogie Nights Massacre could want, ending on a note that cleverly addresses the themes of aging and film alike .

This is a film with a very good understanding of horror film’s history and a willingness to borrow from its breadth to tell what could have been a very predictable story in some delightfully unpredictable, thoughtful ways. It’s that rare film that engages the head, heart and gut all at once, and I’m deeply impressed by how well it works on each of those levels. Throughout the film, RJ insists that pornography can also be art, and it’s hard not to see that as a commentary on how horror film is treated - you come to this film thinking you’re going to get something raw and grimy and down and dirty, and you end up getting art.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon