Mia Goth as Maxine / Pearl Jenna Ortega as Lorraine Martin Henderson as Wayne Gilroy Scott Mescudi as Jackson Owen Campbell as RJ Brittany Snow as Bobby-Lynne Stephen Ure as Howard
NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.
The camera starts positioned behind a doorway, framing the shot in a smaller boxier format reminiscent of old-school movies. The camera pushes through the door and the frame extends to a wide shot, revealing a bloody crime scene. This change in frame size sets the stage for what’s to come as the film proper finds itself switching between a boxy format and a wide format, the former used in depicting the pornographic film that the main characters of the story are shooting and the latter used to depict the story proper. As the camera crosses the door’s threshold from one “frame” to another, it becomes apparent that the liminal space between these two frames of reference – art and reality – is what X sets out to explore.
While police investigate the trail of violence at the scene, a television set on the premises blares the ramblings of a conservative Christian preacher talking about moral degradation – a clear contrast in values to both the violent setting and the story of the aspiring pornographers. With carnage guaranteed, the film cuts to 24 hours earlier.
One of the crew-members, Maxine (Mia Goth) sits in front of a mirror and gazes into her reflection. She adulates herself while snorting cocaine, affirming her identity as a “star”. Her boyfriend and the producer of her films, Wayne (Martin Henderson) retrieves her from the dressing room she occupies, frisking her and the rest of his crew to a rural property in Texas for their next project. On the way to the location, the crew enter a gas station; Maxine bemoans her lack of status but Wayne assuages her and reaffirms that her “X-factor” will propel her into the limelight; while the couple valorizes the star-making powers of pornography the voice of the Christian preacher from the film’s start comes into prominence from a television in the station, decrying the degenerate functions of sexual deviancy brought about by the culture of sexual liberation; once again a contrast in values is emphasized between conservative Christian values and the pleasures which the former decries as sin.
Even within the crew there’s a difference in orientation towards sex. The director of the pornographic film, RJ (Owen Campbell) believes that porn can be elevated to the level of “art” while the actors see it as nothing more than a good bit of fun; it’s just smut after all. Thus, sex is positioned as art, entertainment, impulse, and source of evil. Director Ti West takes these perspectives and also transposes them against the slasher genre, a mapping which works out given the similarities in domain; slashers not only feature healthy amounts of fanservice in the form of scantily-clad/nude women but the sub-genre’s focus on gore, violence, and methods of execution position it as a pornography of violence.
In this sense, the moralizing of the preacher doubles as the moralizing inherent to the slasher genre which often finds its most promiscuous characters dying in brutal fashion while the virginal characters, chaste and “uncorrupt”, escape from the clutches of the killer. This transformation of the sub-genre’s themes to literal character qua superego gives the film a distinctive flavor wherein the protagonists are less fighting an antagonist killer as much as they’re fighting the ethical template by which “slashers” are structured. As the film cuts between the pornography being shot and the story proper, the binaries present between slasher/porn, porn/art, art/reality become blurry and suggest that the difference is just a question of vantage point.
The beauty of X stems from its ability to engage in such posturing without forcing the audience to forgo the slasher proper. West constantly cuts from shots of the porno to shots of the film proper begging the question on where artifice and art begin and end in relation to one another. In addition, he consistently utilizes a triple cross-cut between seemingly disparate events to suggest a hidden connection. None of these cuts interrupt the flow of the action or the momentum of the story, so an audience uninterested in the why can enjoy the bloodshed unabashedly without having to worry about thinking through a potential payoff while viewers more focused on cerebral elements of the filmmaking and themes can analyze the flow of the editing – it’s the perfect balance between engaging with the audience while entertaining them in the manner they hope.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
X is one of the best slashers to come out this side of Wes Craven’s Scream, deconstructing the slasher sub-genre in a fresh new way while relishing in its gory fun. The film’s navigation into the intersections of art, sexuality, reality along with the clever nods to the horror genre at large make it a must-watch for genre fans looking for a great time while providing enough heady material for viewers wanting to do a deeper-dive on the material.
Rating
10/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Based on a true story text. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is tucked away within frames in the frame. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is lost in thought. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) turns to answer the landlady. The landlady (Dee Wallace) wants Samantha to take the apartment. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) stares down at the place’s listing. The price is out of her range. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) walks back to her dorm room as the title card drops. The opening sets the tone with its healthy sprinkle of 70’s and 80’s horror homages and references to the Satanic Panic gripping the times. The milieu sets expectations, so we know what to expect. Samantha’s good luck is going to very quickly run out.
The film opens with text claiming that it’s based on a true story regarding the Satanic Panic of the 80’s. The text fades to black which then fades into to a view of a room. A young woman, Samantha (Joceline Donahue), can be seen framed by a set of doorways and shadows; she’s tucked away within the space. The camera slowly zooms in to get a better perspective of her; she’s lost in thought and the long zoom only exemplifies the intensity of her deliberation.
Suddenly, an older woman (Dee Wallace) approaches Samantha from behind and asks the latter if she enjoys the apartment unit. Samantha snaps back to reality, turns around, and claims it’s perfect. The landlady is enthused by the response. She claims that she didn’t like another applicant who seemed like trouble and would rather Samantha, someone who reminds her of her own good-natured daughter, move into the location instead.
But while the residence appears to be perfect, it’s clear there’s an issue. Samantha gazes apprehensively at the listing’s price and the reason for her earlier indecision simultaneously becomes apparent: she doesn’t have the funds needed to afford the location. When she mentions her financial struggles, the landlady decides to waive some initial fees and put off the first payment; helping out a daughter surrogate matters more than making a higher profit. With some financial wiggle room, Samantha hops off to her dorm room.
While she traverses, the opening sequence proceeds in gusto with loud yellow credits, diegetic music introduced by Samantha’s Walkman, and a few freeze frame shots. If the opening’s “true story” homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror wasn’t enough, this sequence makes the 70’s/80’s horror milieu that the film is placing itself within clear and sets expectations of where the story is going to go, cueing the viewer to focus in on the smaller details on the journey as opposed to its destination.
Samantha (Jocelin Donahue)sees a sock on her door. A babysitter ad is surrounded by notices about an upcoming eclipse. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) takes the first slip with a callback number for the ad. The add uses the “$” symbol as a replacement for “S”.With an awful living situation in her dormitory, it’s no wonder that Samantha is desperate to escape. Getting money to leave is the only thing that’s on her mind which is why a babysitting ad provides to be so tantalizing.
But at the end of her trek, Samantha sees a sock hanging on her door, a telltale sign that her roommate (Heather Robb) has the room occupied for carnal purposes. Frustrated, she knocks on the door and reminds her roommate that it’s morning, implying that the latter’s “adventure” has been ongoing since the night and has prevented Samantha from being able to enter her own living area. What should have been her private reprieve from the world becomes an uninhabitable space occupied by antagonistic “others”.
Unwilling to walk in and deal with her roommate and her roommate’s partner in the nude, Samantha walks off and leaves the dormitory. She passes by a bulletin board plastered with flyers: in the center is an ad for a babysitter job and surrounding it are calls to join in watching an upcoming eclipse. The camera lingers on the board with the ad positioned center-frame even after Samantha passes by it highlighting the importance of what it conveys.
Then, Samantha walks back into frame and re-reads the babysitting ad. She checks around to make sure no one’s watching her and takes the first of the slips containing the number to call. She leaves the frame and the camera zooms in on the ad, emphasizing that the “S” in “Sitter” is written with a “$” symbol; Samantha’s desperate desire to find a new residence necessitates a quick stream of cash and that’s all she can focus on now.
Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) calls the number. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) wallks away from the phone. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) responds to the caller. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) stares suspiciously at the phone. The paranoia sets in as Samantha experiences a strange phenomena with a public phone. She calls the number on the ad but gets no response, so she leaves a message with a proper call-back number. Yet, as soon as she begins to leave the area, the public phone begins to ring. Somehow, the client managed to track down which public phone Samantha was using and call it all well under a minute. The feeling of being watched becomes palpable as Samantha looks back at the phone as if anticipating a presence to be lurking.
She gets to a payphone and calls the number only to hear the answering machine; she leaves her name and number and asks for a callback if the opportunity is still available. The camera stays in place as she walks off, framing both her and the phone against one another; the visual importance given to the inanimate object generates a slight unease.
But then the phone starts to ring. Samantha is as surprised as us and walks back to receive the seemingly impossible call. Accordingly, she asks the caller, who is revealed to be the babysitter client, how they got the payphone number and called it; the sequence of events implies that someone had to have been watching her put the call in to call back the phone quickly enough so that she would be able to hear it and pick it up. Yet, the client sidesteps the question and presses on with the opportunity, ascertaining if Samantha is still interested. She quickly pivots; money is more important than strange coincidences and she can’t afford to question a gig offering a nice payout.
The caller asks to meet at a building in the university and Samantha agrees. She walks away from the phone again and the composition from earlier is replicated. This time, she turns around and looks at the phone quizzingly. The strangeness of the call still lingers on her mind.
Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) hesitates before opening the door. Samantha wades through a minefield of clothes. Her roommate’s partner hits on her. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) waits in front of the student building. A dissolve of Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) waiting. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) decides to leave. The empty building fades to a sign of……the Eclipse PieSamantha (Jocelin Donahue) vents to Megan (Greta Gerwig)Even when Samantha can get into her room, she isn’t allowed to rest as she’s immediately accosted by her roommate’s lover of the day. Desperate to get out of the location, but immediately and in the long run, she waits for a long time for the client to come and meet her to no avail. She expresses her frustrations about her situation to her friend later that day all while the upcoming eclipse lingers in the backdrop.
She treks back to her room and sees the sock removed from the door knob. She hesitates for a moment, accepts the possibility of walking on her roommate having sex, and then opens the door to go in. Yet, what she enters into isn’t that much better. Her roommate’s side of the room is absolutely filthy with clothes littering the floor. After traversing the cloth minefield, Samantha tries to pack her bag but is promptly hit on by her roommate’s partner. It’s no wonder why she wants to leave as soon as possible.
Yet, things only proceed to get more frustrating for Samantha as she waits for her caller to approach. Even though she puts her Walkman on, the music is barely audible; she can barely focus on it in preparation for what’s to come. A dissolve showcases time passing her by. When she realizes that in the time she’s waited an entire class has finished, she decides to abandon the endeavor. The disappointing scene dissolves into a sign for “Eclipse Pie” – another mention of the eclipse.
It’s at this restaurant where Samantha finally divulges the frustrations building up in her up to the point to her best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig). Her fears about not having the money to get to a place she can call home swell up and threaten to burst. The babysitter job was the perfect opportunity to get cash quickly and under the table.
Megan tries to lift Samantha’s spirits up. First, she assures Megan that the latter will be taken care of if she can’t find any money. Megan comes from a family of wealth and at the very least will help her friend with a place to stay. Second, she highlights that the job could have been awful: “the kid could be from hell.” This call-back to the opening text’s mention of “Satanic cults” adds to the unease surrounding the situation. Perhaps, it’s a good thing Samantha didn’t get the job.
When Megan offers to help Samantha get revenge by finding and tearing down all the potential babysitter ads put up by the no-show client to ensure that no one responds to their call, there’s a part of us that wants Samantha to agree and prevent the seeming inevitability. However, Samantha, the upstanding girl the landlady characterized her to be, refuses her friend’s offer to retaliate and goes back to her room to figure out what to do.
Samantha tries to get a moment’s rest. The faucets cover up the noise of Samantha crying. Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) is frustrated in the stall. The water swirls around the drain, accumulating faster than it can be removed. The sound of water from the faucets covers up the sounds of Samantha’s frustrations while making the weight of her misery apparent: her problems are piling up faster than she can possibly get rid of them.
Unfortunately, while her roommate’s nighttime visitor is now gone, her roommate is still very much present and her constant snoring makes catching even a moment’s rest impossible. Samantha seldom places her head on a pillow before giving up and going to the bathroom. She flips all the faucets on. The noise generated by the streams covers the sounds of her crying. She’s isolated in the bathroom stall and the seemingly insurmountable pressure she feels is perfectly encapsulated by the image of the drain in the sink overflowing with water from a never-ending tap.
Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) writes down the Ulman address. The moon begins to get covered in shadows. Megan (Greta Gerwig) and Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) drive to the residence. The cemetery lingers. The camera lingers on the front door. An unseen man opens the door for Megan (Greta Gerwig) and Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) . When the babysitter opportunity presents itself again, Samantha immediately decides to give it a shot. The eclipse takes a bigger prominence as a shot of the moon is shown after her decision is made. Her journey to the residence amplifies the feeling of unease as the camera lingers on a cemetery and withholds as much information about what she’s walking into as possible.
But back in the room, Samantha is greeted with unexpected news from her roommate who informs her that someone called and left a message regarding a babysitter job. Immediately, Samantha jumps on the opportunity, gets the number, and calls the client once more. She quickly forgives his excuse for not coming: he had a hectic morning and found himself unable to come. He mentions that he had another sitter lined up but they backed out and gave him trouble and thanks Samantha for calling back in spite of his treatment of her. Just like with the landlady, it appears that the upstanding Samantha is here to save the day and take the place of another deviant woman.
He asks her to come in for the night and babysit till a little after midnight in exchange for double the rate of pay. With no hesitation, Samantha agrees and calls up Megan for a ride. The film cuts to a shot of the moon, a reminder of the coming eclipse, as Samantha gets into Megan’s car. During their long drive up to the client’s household. Megan admits that she took down all the ads she could find; Samantha realizes that her opportunity was a result of this interference as the client had no one else to reach out to. Megan, for all intents and purposes, got Samantha her position for the night.
This revelation is accompanied by a lingering shot of a cemetery the girls drive by – a sign of things to come. The cemetery dissolves to a shot of the girls finally making it to the house. They get out and make their way to the front door and knock. A long zoom on the door handle raises the stakes on what’s to follow, creating an anticipation to discover the truth behind the job opportunity. The door opens and the girls look up as a pair of long arms extends out to greet them; the client’s face is withheld from the frame and the viewer amplifying the mystery and beckoning both the viewer and the girls to discover what lies in wait. But as the night goes on, Samantha finds herself embroiled in a dark mystery that threatens to completely destroy her life.
While the nature of the mystery, presaged by the film’s opening text and multiple subsequent clues, offers little in the way of genuine surprise, it gives director Ti West the perfect backdrop to explore the anxieties of the time and present an almost mythological depiction of the horrors associated with the respective culture shift. Like the films whose styles it pays homage to, The House of the Devil uses the literal struggle its protagonist undergoes to identify the stakes of the culture war of the era, revealing that the true horror of the “other” side stems not from their perverse desires but from the way those desires seem to mirror and pervert traditional desires.
Samantha’s journey seems to be a slow one, but its meticulous construction gives West ample time to set up her archetypal innocence and establish threats, unseen to her but visible to us, which bubble underneath the surface until the final few minutes of the film where the violence finally erupts. It’s when the struggle finally comes to its climax that the cinematography shifts from the slow and meticulous to the rapidly shifting and handheld, reflecting the transitional state resulting from the horrific conflict. When the dust finally settles, the camera regains its composure and documents the aftermath of the battle, tying the thematic and narrative strands up in a nice, neat, mortifying package
REPORT CARD
TLDR
The House of the Devil perfectly encapsulates the best qualities of 70’s and 80’s horror films, capitalizing on cultural anxieties to elevate macabre sequences into terrifying nightmares. This is a Satanic Panic story that simmers in wait until just the right moment before bursting into a bloody hellscape that no fan of horror should miss.
Rating
10/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
