Here’s an absolute stunner: In the year of our lord 2022, Ti West — the man behind The Sacrament, The House of the Devil, and In A Valley of Violence among other really-solid genre films — has made his return to horror with an A24-released slasher film. It’s called X, and isn’t, for once, about ecstasy. Well, it is about ecstasy and the pursuit of it, but not in a pill form: It’s a slasher film set on a porn set in 1979, bay-bee, and it stars Mia Goth, our queen of transgressive, weird-ass cinema. A24 dropped a trailer for the project earlier on Wednesday, and we are stoked to check this one out.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis, which, as you probably could have guessed, can’t tell you too much about all the wacky shit that’s about to unspool on screens all across the country:
“In 1979, a group of young filmmakers set out to make an adult film in rural Texas, but when their reclusive, elderly hosts catch them in the act, the cast soon find themselves in a desperate fight for their lives.”
X arrives in theaters on March 18, and if you’re really curious about porn history, given that this is a period piece, you have a bevy of resources available to you. There’s The Other Hollywood, which is an excellent oral history by the writers of Please Kill Me about the industry’s roots in L.A., there’s the podcast The Rialto Report, which seeks to document the lives of those who worked in the industry during the golden age (we highly recommend the episodes about Andrea True, who — no shit — performed “More More More” back in the disco dancing days), and there are labels like Vinegar Syndrome who package up restore those older films so you can watch them in high-def. So, yeah, check those out.