X

What it means

X is about the hunger to be seen and wanted, and the resentment of people who feel that hunger can no longer be met. A young crew sets out to shoot an adult film at a Texas farm in 1979, and their elderly hosts, Pearl and Howard, turn on them. Youth and age mirror each other here, and cinema is the tool both sides use to try to be desired.

That is why the old couple are not just monsters. The film treats their longing as real and painful, and their envy of the young is the engine of the horror. Think of the moment the elderly woman approaches Maxine: tender, needy and deeply unsettling all at once. Desire does not fade with age. Maxine has her own hunger, too. Her mantra is that she deserves more than she was given, and the film asks what that ambition costs and who it consumes. Her final escape and the closing image link her to what she has fled, a quiet reminder that wanting more can be inherited.

Why it mattered

When X premiered at South by Southwest in March 2022, it showed how a genre film could study its ancestors while telling its own story. Ti West rebuilds the look, pacing and attitude of late-1970s American horror with modern precision. It is not a remake of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It borrows setting, structure and atmosphere as homage, and also draws on Psycho's farmhouse-and-outbuilding layout and on the era's adult film boom.

Its patience was part of what felt fresh. The first act builds characters and a sense of place, so when the film shifts into a classic slasher pattern, the killings arrive with weight rather than as a checklist. It also asks you to think about looking. A film is being made inside the film, and the characters, the hosts and you are all watchers. It sits in a wave of art-house-minded horror that revisits the grindhouse and slasher era as both tribute and critique.