ILLUSTRATION PETER STRAIN
You know you’ve made something unique when you’ve shocked Scorsese. “I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn’t stop watching,” the director wrote of Ti West’s Pearl, in a fan-letter to production company A24. And Scorsese’s not the only person to be freaked out.
West has injected the slasher genre with fresh blood. With his gore-filled double-header, X and now prequel Pearl, he has created an instantly iconic horror franchise by lovingly pulling together such disparate influences as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Wizard Of Oz, Disney musicals, Debbie Does Dallas and Douglas Sirk’s ’50s melodramas. Oh, and throw in a flesh-hungry ’gator for good measure.
None of this high-wire genre-hopping would work if he didn’t have a star fit for the job. In last year’s X, set in Texas Chain Saw country in 1979, Mia Goth does double duty as both aspiring sex symbol Maxine Minx and pitchfork-wielding elderly antagonist Pearl. What, though, had happened to Pearl to make her so irreparably twisted? For Pearl, West brought Goth on board as co-screenwriter, and they dialled the clock back to 1918 to explore the character’s violent origin story, with Goth playing young Pearl. The films were shot back-to-back in New Zealand.
West is now working on completing his fast-blooming trilogy: A24 have greenlit MaXXXine, which will find Goth back as Maxine, taking her dreams of stardom to Los Angeles in 1985. We spoke to both of them about creating such an unhinged and unsettling franchise.