Ti West’s X Reverses the Slasher Genre’s Most Entrenched Tropes

Ti West’s X Reverses the Slasher Genre’s Most Entrenched Tropes

While maintaining the look and feel of early slashers, Ti West’s X deconstructs the sub-genre by changing the first victim and the Final Girl.

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Ti West’s X Reverses the Slasher Genre’s Most Entrenched Tropes

The following contains spoilers for X, now available to rent.

Slasher movies erupted into popularity in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and with them came a series of unwritten rules that have been used, spoofed, deconstructed and modernized ever since. Most notable of these is the Final Girl, a term used to describe the lone survivor of the film’s Slasher, almost always female and representing a moral and sexual purity that sets her apart from everyone who is killed. While a new wave of 21st-century meta-horror movies — such as Cabin in the Woods and the Scream franchise — have typically examined this trope through the lens of tongue-in-cheek comedies, Ti West’s latest horror film X keeps its self-aware exploration of the genre grounded in a ruthless realism that perfectly solidifies the world and ideas it conveys.

X revolves around the cast and crew of an adult film production, as they hit the road to shoot their latest porno on an actual farm in rural Texas. They are greeted by the elderly farmer who owns the property, but quickly after they start filming, these young pornographers are killed by Pearl, the farmer’s wife. But when the audience eventually learns Pearl’s motivations, it becomes clear that West isn’t returning to old tropes but is instead turning them on their heads.

Ti West’s X Reverses the Slasher Genre’s Most Entrenched Tropes

Historically, the first killed in a slasher movie is the opposite of the Final Girl: a young woman who uses drugs, has premarital sex or often both. Amidst the moral panic that was evident in the films of this era, sexual liberation was punishable by death at the hands of serial killers and monsters. Thankfully, this outdated and misguided morality tale has been thoroughly rejected by 21st filmmakers, either making fun of or reversing the roles established by this 20th-century trope. X works so well precisely because it adopts the look and vibe of a late ’70s horror movie while rearranging everything else to tell a very different story.

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One of the first clues to this reversal of horror tropes can be seen in X’s first victim. RJ, the film-within-a-film’s cameraman, is the only main character in X to not have sex. In fact, right before his death, he throws a fit when his girlfriend Lorraine wants to do a sex scene in the movie. While RJ has much more in common with the ideals of the traditional Final Girl, his quick death shows that this movie is not on his side, and everything that he represents — prudishness, monogamy, jealousy — is what should be punished.

After the rest of the crew are each shot, stabbed or eaten by alligators, the movie presents audiences with its Final Girl: up-and-coming adult film star Maxine. In much the same way that RJ was the opposite of who usually gets killed first in slashers, Maxine is the opposite of all those earlier Final Girls. As one of the stars of a porno, she certainly doesn’t represent chastity or purity, but she also has more depth than that, as seen by both her past and her plans for the future. By the end of the movie, the audience learns that she is the daughter of a preacher, and she is running away from him and his conservative ideas that align with the moralism of 20th-century slashers. As for her future, Maxine and the rest of the crew continually comment on her “x-factor,” that drive that she wishes to explore that most traditional Final Girls have had snuffed out.

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One of the coolest tricks of X is in its casting, as Mia Goth plays both Maxine and Pearl, the Slasher and the Final Girl. This elegant decision ties all of these themes together, as the audience is forced to find similarities between these two tropes rather than only conflict. Pearl doesn’t represent the arbiter of moralistic justice but instead is a character consumed with regret and loss, who sees so much of herself in Maxine, a younger version that time has erased. If earlier slashers were cultural responses to the fear of a so-called promiscuous younger generation, Maxine’s survival shows that X is entirely the opposite: a mature reflection on aging and the incredible vivacity of youth that should be allowed to flourish.

X is currently available to rent on AppleTV and Amazon.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/x-reverses-slasher-genre-tropes/

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