X Knows Exactly What Kind of Movie It Is - Xenomania 89

Sex, murder, alligators, and one extremely questionable farmhouse. Welcome to Ti West's X. This week on Xenomania, we're heading back to 1979 for Ti West's X, where a group of young filmmakers arrive at an isolated Texas farm hoping to make an adult movie and leave with considerably fewer cast members than they started with. But underneath the blood and grindhouse aesthetics is a surprisingly strange little horror movie. We get into whether X actually hooked us from the beginning, the bizarre mainstream moment adult films experienced during the 1970s, rental culture, the real-life Farmer's Daughter connection, and the story of Spalding Gray. We also talk about Ti West's decision to put Mia Goth in dual roles, whether the characters are actually likable, and whether any of us initially realized who was underneath all that old-age makeup. We break down the movie's extensive foreshadowing, Easter eggs, kills, and the clues Ti West plants before things go spectacularly wrong. We also tackle the bigger question at the center of the movie: does Pearl actually work as a horror villain? And with X becoming a hit for A24 and launching an entire trilogy, we look at what made this filthy little throwback connect with audiences in the first place. Who walks away with the movie, Mia Goth or Jenna Ortega? Grab your camera, stay out of the lake, and whatever you do, don't piss off the elderly couple who own the property. Welcome to X.