Despite their dissimilar filmographies, I have great affection for both the arthouse friendly A24 and the drive-in exploitation of American International Pictures. That’s why I’m such a sucker for the story behind the making of A24’s Pearl, which follows AIP’s old philosophy that if you’re going to go to the trouble of hauling a cast and crew out to a remote location, you might as well make two pictures while you’re there. Pearl began life in a New Zealand hotel room in October of 2020. While in a government-mandated two-week quarantine ahead of making the 1970s-set horror film X, writer/director […]

Pearl, Ti West’s prequel to the 70s slasher-inspired X, is a far more claustrophobic study of psychological ruin and bodily decay than it is a gory exercise in picking off victims one by one. Unburdened by the heavy prosthetics and dual role that defined her performance in X, star and co-writer Mia Goth, that film’s de facto villain, gives a gloriously unsettling performance as the now titular character depicted during her early 20s in 1918.  Pearl lives under the domineering thumb of her German mother Ruth (Tandi Wright), cares for her Spanish flu-stricken father (Matthew Sunderland) and desperately yearns for […]

Watch the trailer for Pearl, the second film from director Ti West to be released this year. Back in March, we got the ’70s slasher throwback X, and Pearl is a prequel that charts the origin story of X‘s geriatric killer. Mia Goth, who co-wrote the screenplay with West, stars as the titular character during her young womanhood. While filming X, Goth portrayed both the film’s final girl and crazed killer. It appears she sheds the extensive prosthetics and dual performance in Pearl. The film will be released in theaters by A24 on September 16.

“The story can’t just change midway through,” exclaims a pretentious adult film director incredulously in X.  It certainly can in a Ti West horror film, where one of the joys is often the shift from the methodical pace of the opening to the blood-drenched mania of the finale. Set in 1979, X finds a group of ambitious but inexperienced filmmakers heading to a remote Texas farm with dreams of making the next Debbie Does Dallas. However, the troupe fails to inform their hosts – an elderly couple who rent the crew their bunkhouse – about the purpose of their visit, […]

After 2016’s Western, In the Valley of Violence, and several years directing episodic TV, Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Inkeepers, The Sacrament) makes a very welcome return to the world of feature horror with X, a ’70s-set picture in which the sort of ambition that has characterized West’s impressive filmography is both evident on screen as well as the subtext driving the film’s characters. The set-up: a ragtag group of filmmakers ensconce themselves in a rented barn outside a foreboding farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to make a porno feature, The Farmer’s Daughter. Mia […]

SXSW and Ti West have been to each other over the years. The Austin festival premiered his debut feature (The Roost) before going on to play Trigger Man and then breakthrough picture The Innkeepers, which landed West on our Winter, 2012 cover. Now he returns to Texas with, certainly, his starriest movie to date, and one that steps outside of the horror genre he’s best known for. Produced by his usual team alongside Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Pictures, In a Valley of Violence is a revenge western starring John Travolta, Ethan Hawke, Taissa Farmiga and Karen Gillan and set […]

Don’t let the title mislead you: In a Valley of Violence is only Ti West’s second non-horror film. This time around, West tackles the Western with a tonal twist. In an inspired bit of expectation-reversing casting, this classic saga of a violent town on the frontier has John Travolta as the good guy and Ethan Hawke as the villain. The film premieres tomorrow at SXSW. In advance, cinematographer Eric Robbins answered some questions about shooting on 2-perf 35mm, lighting in the desert and his longtime collaboration with West. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? […]

There is nothing new about Slow Cinema. From the very beginning of projected motion pictures in the late 19th century, the Lumière brothers utilized the single take, allowing for the temporal flow in the frame to coincide roughly with the audience’s experience of time. The fracturing of time through editing — borrowing from and keeping with the realist conventions of the novel — put cinema on the path of montage: the art of visual storytelling became equated with rapid movement across time (flashbacks and the implied “meanwhile…”) and space (multiple locations). Even cross-cutting — shifting back and forth between two […]

The Sacrament, Ti West’s found footage horror film, tracks an innocuous visit gone awry. Kentucker Audley, Joe Swanberg and AJ Bowen star as a coterie of photographers who visit Audley’s sister, played by Amy Seimetz, on the Eden Parish commune, where she has lived since completing her rehab program. Turns out the place isn’t as forgiving as Audley and co. suspected. The Sacrament hits theaters on May 1, and you can watch the red band trailer above.

The most important thing to know about V/H/S is that it is more than the sum of its gimmicky-on-paper parts, which include found footage film, genre anthology, and snuffy homage to the recent history of lo-fi horror. Although it is not entirely free of the inherent unevenness of the omnibus film, V/H/S works surprisingly well as a whole because of consistency in the aesthetic, clever writing, and tongue-in-cheek humor across multiple directors’ vignettes. The setup involves a group of 20-something delinquents whose primary activity is shooting prank videos of a slightly racier nature than the likes of Jackass. When they […]