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 […]