2024’s Wildest Thriller Brings the Decade’s Most Unexpected Trilogy Full Circle

Ti West still can’t believe he got away with it.

For the director, who hadn’t made a horror movie in nearly 10 years when he set out to write X, a 1970s-set slasher about amateur adult filmmakers facing off against murderous octogenarians on a decrepit farm in rural Texas, the idea that he was setting in motion — unleashing all her long-repressed rage and regret on an increasingly disturbed sister-in-law — are acquainted with how hypnotic Goth can become in an extended closeup.

“Thinking has never really worked out when it comes to a performance,” the actor says. “The best ideas come from being in the moment, from being present.”

Making Movies About Making Movies

From the beginning, West wanted to make movies about filmmaking that, on both narrative and aesthetic levels, allowed the art of cinematography, sound design, score, acting, special-effects makeup, and more to shine through.

“Craft is very much a part of the process,” says West. “That’s why, in X, they’re making a movie within the movie, to let you behind the curtain. With Pearl, it became about what it feels like to look at the movies and want to be a part of them. And then, with Maxxxine, it became about what if you actually were there, in the industry, and what that feels like.”

Like the other two films, Maxxxine is awash in ’70s and ’80s references. Whereas X modeled itself after sizzling grindhouse spectacles like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Eaten Alive, and Pearl was a demented riff on Disney aesthetics that imitated everything from The Wizard of Oz to Sirkian melodrama, Maxxxine is a psychosexual thriller that pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock and revels in the voyeuristic gaze of Brian de Palma. West even sets a chase sequence around Pyscho’s Bates Motel set and namechecks Body Double and Cruising as influences.

“[It’s] a love-hate letter to making movies.”

Equally core to the X franchise is a symbiotic relationship between pornographic and horror cinema, two historically disreputable forms of filmmaking that thrived on the fringes of ’70s Hollywood. It was the golden age of porn back in 1979, when X was set, and the home-video market was soon set to explode, making films accessible to consumers who could suddenly watch whatever they desired in the privacy of their own homes. By the time Maxxxine picks up in 1985 Los Angeles, porn, horror, and heavy metal have all flooded the market. But new forms of censorship are also emerging to push back on what they saw as corruptive, corrosive influences on the next generation.

“There was a great juxtaposition,” says Kevin Bacon, who plays John Labat, a seedy private detective in the employ of Maxine’s adversary — and who starred in Friday the 13th (in which he memorably got an arrow through the throat) in 1980 before breaking out in 1984’s Footloose.

“The films that were being made were oftentimes very lighthearted; two of them, in my mind, are Footloose and Beverly Hills Cop, but there was also Ghostbusters and The Goonies — fun, bubbly popcorn films,” Bacon explains. “And then there was also the AIDS epidemic, and there was a lot of darkness and desperation that was certainly underneath the surface.”

Bacon felt West’s love of genre cinema when he saw X and Pearl; the actor refers to Maxxxine as “a love-hate letter to making movies,” especially in how it pulls the curtain back for thrilling chase sequences on painstaking recreations of the same studio backlots where Bacon filmed at the beginning of his career.

A Full-Circle Moment

Though this latest film concludes the saga of Maxine’s ascent to stardom, neither West nor Goth will rule out future installments in the franchise, at least not yet. West has “an idea” for how it could continue, which he’s not ready to go into, though he’s teased more stories beyond “the Maxine era.” First, he needs time to recover from the five-year marathon of making X and Pearl back to back and following them up with Maxxxine.

“I’ve been existing at such a high RPM,” he admits. “I don’t quite know what it’s going to be like and what to do with myself when I am not necessarily behind on some deadline for something in the world of the X universe.”

Maxxxine is now playing in theaters.