EXCLUSIVE
MAXXXINE After surviving the Texas massacre in X, Mia Goth’s Maxine heads to LA…
It’s a much bigger, sprawling story and it exists in a very different aesthetic to the first two movies,’ says writer/director Ti West of MaXXXine, the feverishly anticipated follow up to X and Pearl. ‘It’s a 1980s aesthetic. It’s poppy, but still grounded in more of a grittier 80s than a shopping-mall 80s. You’re seeing the glamorous side of the movie business and the seedy side of Hollywood.’
In March 2022, A24 released X, a slasher movie set in 1979 Texas about a group of filmmakers who set out to make a porn movie only to suffer from premature expiration. Mia Goth played dual roles, as final girl Maxine and geriatric killer Pearl. Then, just months later, came Pearl, a prequel that was shot back-to-back with X and focused on Goth playing the eponymous slayer as a young woman on her Texas farm back in 1918. Hemmed in by threat of the Spanish Flu and by a ferociously overbearing mother, Pearl dreams of trading her domestic drudgery for fame and fortune, but instead journeys into madness and murder.
MaXXXine, set in mid-80s Los Angeles, is a sequel to X, with Goth playing survivor Maxine as she seeks to graduate from porn star to horror icon. ‘Porn and horror are often associated as bottom of the barrel,’ says West, who’s talking about his new film for the first time as he makes final colour corrections. ‘You don’t often go from porn right to being a major blockbuster movie star. You go from one lookeddown-upon thing into another looked-down-up
