MaXXXine: Everything About the Horror Film That Follows X and Pearl
MaXXXine is the last film in Ti West‘s horror trilogy, which began with X and continued with Pearl, a film that even earned the approval of Martin Scorsese. X, the first of the 3, features Jenna Ortega and Mia Goth and takes place in 1979, where we follow a group of amateur filmmakers looking for a location to film an adult film. The team arrives at a farm in rural Texas, where they end up attracting the attention of a brutal murderer who takes them out, one by one. Pearl, the second film, stars Mia Goth again and takes place in 1918, where we see a woman who is obsessed with fame and fortune, which leads her to lose her mind and become a brutal and violent murderer, who is willing to put an end to anyone who dares to try to stop her dreams. Now we have MaXXXine, a film that closes the trilogy that once again features Goth, one of the new muses of horror, as the protagonist of a violent story, full of blood, sex, and death.
A24 continues to rely on the talent of the new horror master Ti West, who forms a luxury tandem with the actress, screenwriter, and producer Mia Goth. On this occasion, we find Maxxxine Minx trying to succeed as an actress in Hollywood, making a substantial leap from adult to the conventional cinema. But as news begins to spread about a real-life brutal serial killer on the loose, the survivor will discover that her past is not done with her. The trailer presented by A24 is atmospheric and dark, combining elements of both slasher and giallo. The audiovisual also abounds with nods to cinema and the genre in particular, such as a scene in which Maxine tours what appears to be Universal Studios and exchanges glances with Pearl from the window of the iconic house from Psycho.
The reference to Psycho also sheds some light on one of the main aesthetic references that West has handled this time: the giallo, a subgenre of a stabbing that emerged in Italy in the sixties, whose main authors – aesthetes of Eros and Thanatos such as Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Sergio Martino, and Lucio Fulci – had Hitch as their north star. As we read in World of Reel, the word “Giallo” was heard many times at the exit of the first MaXXXine screening test, held in Burbank at the end of 2023. The reaction to this test pass was very positive, especially in what was referred to as the work of Goth and Kevin Bacon, who plays a private detective with a tendency to steal scenes. Elizabeth Debicki, Giancarlo Esposito, Lily Collins, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, and the singer Halsey complete a cast that, as reported in these first reports, also includes the presence of a secret actor in an unmentioned role.
The MaXXXine Trailer
The first MaXXXine trailer shows Goth alongside singer Halsey and takes us to Hollywood in the 80s, where we see a young actress trying to make the transition from adult films to “serious” films, all in one moment. that the city was being terrorized by a serial killer. Like the previous films, MaXXXine is gory, but it is also a stylish film that explores the psychology of a character desperate for fame.
When is MaXXXine Released in Theaters?
The A24 film, which has given us the best horror films in recent years, will hit theaters on July 5, 2024.
Where to Watch X and Pearl?
X is available streaming On Demand (you can rent or buy it on platforms such as Prime Video or Apple TV+), while Pearl can be seen on the Max platform. MaXXXine will hit theaters and will then be available on streaming, probably on Max alongside Pearl.
What is MaXXXine About?
The film’s synopsis reads: In 1980s Hollywood, adult film star and aspiring actress Maxine Minx finally gets her big break. But as a mysterious killer stalks Hollywood stars, a trail of blood threatens to reveal her sinister past. It is interrupted by the arrival of a serial killer who terrorizes everyone in the city and who could be a danger to her.
The Cast of MaXXXine
Mia Goth, from Infinity Pool, X, and Pearl, is the protagonist of this story and plays adult film actress Maxine Minx. She is accompanied by a great cast made up of Giancarlo Esposito, from Breaking Bad and The Gentlemen, Michelle Monaghan, from Echoes, the singer Halsey, who plays a companion of MaXXXine, Elizabeth Debicki, from Tenet and The Crown, Kevin Bacon, Lily Collins and Bobby Cannavale. This is the first of 3 Ti West films to include the story of a real serial killer, the infamous Richard Ramirez, who came to be known as The Night Stalker.
We can bet that this surprise actor will be the one who gives life in fiction to Richard Ramirez, also known as “The Night Stalker”. A very real psychopathic killer who terrorized the population of California between 1984 and 1985, being convicted four years later of thirteen murders, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. Ramirez would sneak into his victims’ homes and spy on them while they slept, perhaps deciding what he was going to do with them. He used to mark those he ended up killing with a pentagram, as seen in the MaXXXine trailer, but there were also quite a few cases in which the poor unfortunate woman, after hours of intense physical and psychological torture, was allowed to continue. living (with the indelible trauma that entails).
This is not the first time that the Night Stalker’s reign of terror has slipped through the cracks of a slasher: fans of American Horror Story can attest to this. The idea of confronting Maxine Minx, a survivor of a fictional massacre, with a real serial killer is intriguing, although we suspect that West and Goth have several tricks up their sleeve in this regard… For the rest, the trailer for MaXXXine explains a common thread that X and, above all, Pearl already pointed out: the evolution of American cinema (specifically, its formats) throughout the 20th century is seen as an unhealthy obsession with a certain idea of stardom that, as we see time and time again, is written in blood and screams of madness.
If Pearl was a Technicolor nightmare with direct allusions to the first four decades of Hollywood and its sequel narrated the revolution that Super 8 represented for the creation of an industry outside the industry, MaXXXine seems to focus on the advent of VHS and blockbusters, two phenomena impossible to understand without taking into account the degree of feedback that ended up consolidating them as the only option in the mainstream after the fall of the New Hollywood. Each era sold its idea of a stellar dream, but the two characters played by Mia Goth throughout the trilogy deactivate any pink filter to expose that big lie, presenting it as a pathological fixation that, like Ramirez, ends up leaving a trail. of corpses. Self-reflexive horror cinema, then. This time with great eighties songs on the soundtrack.
