SeX and Violence: Ti West Returns to Cinema with X

The director explains why he's been away, and what TV taught him

By Richard Whittaker, Fri., March 11, 2022

Courtesy of A24

There’s a joke in horror circles that the South by Southwest Film Festival should be renamed South by Ti West. Since his debut feature, The Roost, debuted there in 2005 Ti West has become synonymous with the festival’s programming, returning two years later with survival thriller Trigger Man, and in 2011 with his resurrection of the classic American ghost story, The Innkeepers. Even when he put down the slasher’s blade for the gunslinger’s six-shooters with his PTSD-drenched cowboy drama In a Valley of Violence, West moseyed back to Austin for its world premiere.

And then six years of big-screen silence from West before he returns to SXSW with period porno-horror X, just a week before its national release by A24. Not that he’s been doing nothing. This six years were filled with TV work: Pre-Valley, he’d already directed episodes of the small-screen Scream adaptation, but since then he’s taken on high-profile horror shows like Cinemax’s Outcast, Fox’s The Exorcist, and Amazon Prime’s Them.

So what happened, and why come back to the movies now? The simple answer is that West doesn’t like repeating himself. “I’d made a bunch of horror movies in a row, and I just feel like I would run the risk of repeating myself.” In a Valley of Violence was intended to be a break, a change of genre and tone, “and then TV sort of showed up, and I did one and it snowballed into many.”

Serving in the low- and mini-budget indie trenches prepared him well for the format leap: If anything, after pulling multiple jobs on multiple projects (often his own writer, director, editor, producer, and actor), “I was able to fall into the schedule of TV really effortlessly,” West said. “Everyone said, ‘You don’t have any time and you don’t have any money.’ I was like, ‘You have plenty of time and plenty of money compared to what I was used to doing.’ So production didn’t intimidate me.”

Film and TV, he noted, are very different jobs. Walking onto a show like Amazon’s Tales From the Loop, “there was a showrunner who wanted to do something and needed help to do it, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I can help you do that, because I know how traumatic it is because I’m you in my other life.’ I get to do that, then that’s really satisfying, and I get to work on all these projects I wouldn’t necessarily do myself, and I get to work with actors that I wouldn’t necessarily meet otherwise, and I get to work with crew that I didn’t hire, and I get to work with all new equipment.”

As for his return to cinema, that was a simple decision. “It had been long enough where I had an idea kicking around to maybe go back to the trenches.” Directing TV can be a quick process (“You get a call – ‘Can you be on a plane on Monday?’ ‘Sure,’ and now you’re directing.”), but because of the exponentially greater degree of sweat equity just to get an indie movie to that first clapperboard, “you have to have a reason to do it.”

Director Ti West (Courtesy of A24)

“I came to these movies, it was always, ‘Oh, can you handle this one?’ ‘I dare you to see this one.’ ‘I hear this one’s really crazy.’” – Ti West

His reason this time was that he wanted to make “something very craft-focused. I wanted to take something that was a traditionally a very low-brow subgenre of sex and violence and exploitation, and try to do something crafty with it.”

All those ideas come together in X. It’s the febrile summer of 1979, and a low-budget porn production, hoping to get in on the incoming wave of home video, makes the terrible mistake of filming just outside of Houston. Of course, the when and where were going to raise comparisons to Tobe Hooper’s double-bill of Lone Star horror, the arid nightmare of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the swamp-sweat horrors of Eaten Alive. Such comparisons, West said, are completely out of his hands. “If I made it in the northeast, maybe it would have had a Friday the 13th vibe to it, so it’s a little bit pick-your-poison.”

As for the particular timing of X, that was definitely deliberate, at the intersection of the end of the arthouse Seventies (“the most revered era of American cinema”) and the early days of VHS. “If you were an independent filmmaker, adult films, nonindustry films, the home video market was giving you a way in.” Moreover, X definitely plays to West’s love of period movies. His breakout film, 2009’s The House of the Devil, was set in the winter of 1983, and West admitted that, while getting an era right comes with certain challenges, they’re worth the effort to lure in the audience. “When you make a period movie you transport not just yourself making the movie but the audience into another world. If I’m watching something and everyone’s on their phones and everyone’s on their laptops, I don’t get quite as whisked away [as] I do when I’m in an environment where I’m, ‘Oh, I have to go there with these people because it’s not necessarily reflecting what I’m doing this afternoon.”

But aside from the artistry and film theory, this is West back on the horror kick, and it may well be his goriest film to date. “It’s a slasher movie,” he said. “If you’re going to make a slasher movie, you can’t be soft. If I think of any slasher movie or, growing up, how I came to these movies, it was always, ‘Oh, can you handle this one?’ ‘I dare you to see this one.’ ‘I hear this one’s really crazy.’ And I would like X to be the same for somebody else.”