‘X’ Marks the Spot: How Ti West Made a New Horror Classic

thewrap.com:

well, eventually I’ll go and make another movie. I’m enjoying doing this, but I’m going to go back and make a movie. And I was trying to figure out like what that movie might be.”West tried to think about whether or not the new movie would be a horror movie.

Or whether he wanted to go back at all. “It’s very traumatic to make a movie,” West said. Instead, he started thinking “about what I liked about movies in general.” He hit upon the technical aspect of films, particularly horror films – “it’s what I remember being most enthralled by, I suppose, whether it be practical effects or camera direction or music or all these things that have been very viscerally effective over the years for me.” “I didn’t want to make a movie out like people in the Hollywood system make movies because I don’t know anything about that nor did I want to make a movie about people making a horror movie because that’s too meta and uninteresting to me,” West said.Instead, West turned his attention to the adult film industry and the “symbiotic relationship” between horror and porn as “outsider genres.” “Particularly in the seventies, you could make them without being part of the movie industry and still go right to a consumer, and then you could become a filmmaker if you just did it,” West said. “I thought, I’ve never made a slasher movie.

I’d also felt like horror movies had gotten soft.” Incorporating his ideas about the connection between horror and porn West wondered, maybe this setup for a movie is they’re making a porn movie that turns into a slasher movie?West wrote the “X” script in secret, inspired in part by landmark ‘70s movies such as “Two-Lane Blacktop” and “Don’t Look Now,” and sent it to A24, the indie art house darlings behind such.