The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C-
Director Ti West was hailed as the next great horror director when he burst onto the scene in 2009 with The House of the Devil (which I think is overrated) and then in 2011 with The Innkeepers (which I think is underrated). For whatever reason, he largely disappeared from the scene in the last ten years and has mainly stuck to television work and segments of anthologies. X is West’s return to full-blown horror films and it quickly becomes clear that he hasn’t changed much; the strengths and weaknesses are still there, but he seems to have doubled-down on what I consider to be his weaknesses. Much like House of the Devil, I appreciate the intent far more than the final product. X may be (or at least is intended to be) a throwback to 1970s horror films, it is also a downright bore for 80% of its running time.
Set in 1979, X follows an amateur film crew as they set out to shoot a porn movie for the brand-new home video market (for my millions of Gen Z readers: prior to the existence of VHS, you actually had to go to a theater to see porn; the idea of watching porn at home was quite revolutionary). For their shooting location, they rent a guest house on a farm in middle-of-nowhere Texas that’s owned by a deranged and sexually-repressed elderly couple. As you might imagine, this descends into the murderous hillbilly/redneck subgenre of horror with the obvious comparisons being The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. There is also an alligator in the film that’s clearly meant to invoke thoughts of Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive.
The biggest problem with X is that, despite the obvious trajectory of the plot, absolutely nothing happens for a very long time. My friend and I started checking our watches around the one-hour mark and gave each other a look that conveyed “isn’t this supposed to be a horror movie?” The film clocks in at an hour and 46 minutes, which is a painfully excessive running time considering that nothing much happens for the first 70 minutes or so. Now, before some twat inevitably messages me with “you don’t get slow burn horror lol! go back to watching slasher sequels moron hahaha,” allow me to retort. I’m a big fan of slow-burn horror films, but when the style is done correctly (classic examples include The Exorcist and The Shining), the horror increases gradually. Regan’s possession and Jack’s descent into madness don’t happen quickly, but there is a steady increase in horror as the films build to a climax. That isn’t the case with X. Quite literally, nothing frightening happens for the majority of the running time. That isn’t the escalating horror of a proper slow-burn horror film, that’s just poor pacing.
The final half hour is exactly what you would expect, though, and the film does deliver in the last act. Although predictable, X does finally get going with graphic kills and solid practical gore effects. Necks are slashed and eyes are gouged with farm tools and, for these brief moments, I was finally watching the 1970s-style horror flick that Ti West was trying to deliver. It was just too little, too late at that point.
This being 2022, the thematic levels of the film are also handled with the subtlety of a kick to the face. X examines the contrast between supposedly moralistic, old-school people and supposedly free-spirited, new-school people and how those sides of the societal coin can easily be flipped. This is the exact same theme as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, but those films used that theme as subtext; it is there for those that want to look for deeper meaning, but it isn’t overt. In X, the theme is simply the text and requires no intellectual inquiry. If you don’t get that the seemingly conservative couple is actually more repressed and sex-obsessed than the hippies shooting the porno, don’t worry because the movie will hammer you over the head with it. This inability to distinguish between subtext and text is one of my biggest issues with modern film and modern film criticism. It isn’t having a message that is the issue, it’s the textual presentation of the message. Night of the Living Dead has subtext. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has subtext. Most modern horror films, X included, fail to differentiate between a story with a message vs. a message with a story attached to it.
I honestly didn’t think that a (supposedly) 1970s-style horror movie that mixes amateur porn with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be this underwhelming. While X has the aesthetics, T&A and (eventually) gore of a 70s movie, it lacks the pacing and quality writing that marked the movies that itis trying to emulate. Too boring for the grindhouse crowd and too seedy for the arthouse crowd, X couldn’t fully commit in either direction and left me mostly bored in the middle.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_(2022_film)#/media/File:X_(2022_film).jpeg
