X: Horror, Porn, and the Rural South
I’m pretty late to the party here (as often happens; you can’t help being tardy on pop culture sometimes when you study the Middle Ages), but I’ve just seen the film X, and holy heartland, my honies, do I have some thoughts.
For those who haven’t seen it, X stars scream queens Mia Goth and Jenny Ortega, and the conceit of the film is that a group of porn filmmakers in 1979 rent out a bunk house on a rural Texan farm so they can shoot their porno. Their idea is to make a porno that’s a real, cinematic, like film-film. A picture of quality. Something hot as hell, but relatively high class. Something that the film team can turn a substantial profit on, particularly with the rise of at-home porn viewing, on cassettes and other portable media.
Things go sideways from there, but I’m not going to focus too much on a close analysis of the plot, because I first want to talk about the reviews of this film.
The Guardian calls the film a “back-to-basics slasher” that “pits porn stars against elderly killers,” and then goes on to talk about how the film resists all the high-brow and high-concept horror that’s come out in such large quantities in the past fifteen years or so. The review reads the film as a paradoxically refreshing return to the 1980s, when slasher horror was everywhere, and was just “meat-and-potatoes slice-and-dice.”[1] And, to be fair, there is a lot of gore. Like, a lot.
A slightly more metacritical review from rogerebert.com calls the film “an icky good time that’s primarily a love letter to the filmmaking process.”[2] This is absolutely right, and central to what I think is fascinating about this film. The ambitions of the film team are to make a porno that is both art and profitable. The cameraman RJ, in particular, voices the film’s metacommentary on filmmaking, suggesting that they have to be careful to safeguard the coherence of the storyline, that they have to think carefully about camera angles, and that they have to capture something valuable on film. According to RJ, the remote location is “perfect. It’s really going to add a lot of production value”; later he says, “It is possible to make a good dirty movie.”
The reviewer from rogerebert.com also notes the film’s programmatic and somewhat unsubtle intertextuality—it makes homages to Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Spit on your Grave, The Shining, and other films, but the reviewer can’t get past her feeling that the film “doesn’t offer much” past “nasty fun”; she notes that “X never goes deeper than these visceral pleasures.” And you know what? It’s a fair claim: it’s really a film about viscera, viscerality, and visceral pleasure. I’m not sure I’d ever put this film on a course syllabus, for example.
But then again…I just might. If that syllabus were called something like, Horror Theory in Practice, or Horror as Americana, or even Horror and the Rural South.
Because the thing is, this film is actually really smart about theories of horror, and, to my eye, is actively engaged with them, testing them out, adjusting them, and contesting them.
As I’ve talked about before on this substack, horror is a genre in search of a Grand Unifying Theory. (Head’s up: I’m writing two books about this at the moment, so stay tuned!) But there are some pretty compelling proto-theories to work with. There’s the theory of abjection, as articulated by theorist Julia Kristeva; there’s the Freudian uncanny always as a fun go-to for theorizing horror; there’s my own idea of the horror hangover. And then there’s quite a lot of very smart criticism that focuses on how the horror genre—by definition—has to elicit a physiological response from viewers. If you don’t feel it in your body, it isn’t horror. That’s why we jump, cringe, scream, and retch: we’re getting it in the guts, in biophysiological empathy with the main characters.
What many horror theorists do with that principle is to yoke together horror with the other major film genre that relies upon and demands a biophysiological response from an audience: pornography.
So what I find interesting about X is it’s not its head-on, hard-charging sex and gore, but it’s head-on and hard-charging awareness of and eagerness to explore the connection between our biophysiological responses to sex and our biophysiological responses to gore. How fast, the film implicitly dares us, can you switch from scopic pleasure—triggered when we watch the very extensive sex scenes in the film—to scopic disgust? The film is, I believe, a very explicitly designed amusement ride that hurls us at high g-force from one end of the biophysiological film response spectrum to the other. I’m picturing one of those big-ass boats that rocks from one end of a parabola to the other at an amusement park. But where people are screwing at one end and getting their heads driven over by pick-up trucks at the other. And you know what? As with those rides, I found myself getting pretty queasy in this film. And I think that was part of filmmaker Ti West’s point.
As the main actress in the porn film, Bobby-Lynne, says: “We turn folks on. And that scares ‘em.” Erotic pleasure and fear are kissing cousins (ew, sorry) in this movie. And it is pretty nauseating.
But to me, where the film gets even more sophiscated is in the larger critique of American culture that it mounts on that platform of the audience’s nausea, disorientating, dizziness, and physiological arousal. That is, the film cracks us open with its visceral eroticism and its straight-up viscera because it’s trying to land a point about rurality, American history, and the South.
The film is set in Texas, as I said, and it wears is southernness very heavily: everyone has a slow, drawling accent; the costuming reflects hot, steamy weather; we end up on an isolated, rural farm; there’s a televangelist yammering on in the background of many scenes. Maxine (Mia Goth), who ends up being the final girl in the film (sorry for spoiler, but are you really surprised?) talks in the film about how she wants to make it; she wants to be a star; she has cosmopolitan tastes. She is a rural southern girl—in fact, she’s the daughter of the televangelist we keep seeing on the TVs in the film—who wants to make it to the Big Cities of the coasts. We have every reason, at the end, to think she does indeed make it there.
But the path she has to take to get out of the rural south and its sticky, bloody history is to go right through that history.
The bunkhouse they shoot the porno in is, as the farmer tells them, a “building for soldiers during the Civil War.” We see Jackson, the black man who’s the male star of the porno, not seeming too comfortable with that revelation. Understandably.
Amplifying the historical discomfort of this setting and scene, the farmer asks the white man who’s producing the film—Wayne, played by Martin Henderson—if he served in the military during Vietnam. Wayne says no, smilingly citing his flat feet. But from the couch, Jackson pipes up and says, “I did. Two tours in South Vietnam. Had enough farmers trying to shoot me for one lifetime. You know what I mean, Pops?” Jackson is calling out the race-based danger he realizes he is in, being on this man’s farm, in the rural south, in the late 70s. He’s asserting his own claim to a version of full Americanness that he hopes will be meaningful to this farmer: Hey, I’m a vet, just like you. I fought for this country, just like you. Don’t fucking shoot me for doing what you know perfectly well I’m going to be doing with these three white women.
In this racially-charged context, cinematographer RJ’s refrains in the film that “The camera changes things” and “It’s not real life, just a movie” ring importantly false. Because for Jackson and Jackson alone, the horror that’s coming for them in the film is absolutely a representation of real life for black people in the history of the American south. What’s important and powerful, I think, about this film, is that it triggers that nausea feeling via the back-and-forth between erotic and horror viscerality as a set up for its most important subtext, which is that, for Jackson, this outcome is entirely too historically realistic: he eventually gets shot in the chest at close range for “trespassing” on the old man’s farm and for “enticing my wife.” The old, white, male farmer uses a firearm to shoot a young black man for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and for seducing a white woman? Sounds way, way, way too familiar. Looks like the camera does not change things, but simply allegorizes reality; looks like it’s not just a movie, but real life.
So, coming back to the Guardian review’s contention that this film is really a fun, stupid romp of grossness, I have to say that I would agree to disagree. X is, without question, a gross film. And it loves its own grossness. It revels in it. But it’s not stupid. And it’s definitely not “just” a gross film. X has, to my mind, a fairly high-brow and sophisticated politics to it. It is not anywhere near as high-brow or sophisticated along these lines as Jordan Peele’s jaw-dropping masterwork Get Out! But there is space in the world of experimental horror for many different kinds of metacritical and politically-engaged work. X is a film that dives deep into viewers’ guts and shakes them to the point of nausea, to get viewers physiologically startled into a place of openness to an unflinching critique of the history of the rural American south as a place of race-based violence.
And at the same time, the film makes a really loud but easy-to-miss reinvention of one of the mainstays of horror criticism: the final girl. Maxine, who’s the only character to make it to the end and drive away from the soupy mess on the farm, isn’t an innocent, virginal, moral icon, as is the usual requirement for final girls, per Carol Clover’s ground-breaking book on slasher films and feminism, Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992). Quite the contrary, Maxine is a porn film actress. She is ambitious, foul-mouthed, hypersexual, and selfish. Yet the film allows her to be the one to survive to the end. So, embedded into this seriously gross film isn’t just a political critique of racial violence in the American south, but also a critique of the absurd and annoying moralism of the slasher genre—the idea that only “good” girls will escape in the end. Maxine is a committed, proud, bad girl. And she makes it out alive.
So X is doing quite a lot of high-order theorizing about horror: it’s looking at viscerality, weaponizing at how we respond to the close yoking together of guts and sex, making a stern critique of racialized violence in the American south, and it’s suggesting that maybe, just maybe, the bad girls can get out alive, too. Maybe they don’t have to be the passive victims of the horror films they star in, just as they maybe don’t have to be the passive toys of the porn industry; Maxine’s sex scene with Jackson, in fact, was unusual in that Maxine was on top the entire time, and everyone genuinely bought her sexual pleasure, whereas the film explicitly taught us that Bobby-Lynne’s sexual pleasure was fake, an act she put on for the camera.
As many of you may know, X is part of a triology. I’ll be writing about its prequel, Pearl, for next time, and I’m eagerly anticipating the release of Maxxxine, the third, in July.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/mar/16/x-review-back-to-basics-slasher-pits-porn-stars-against-elderly-killers