Ti West’s ‘X’ Gets a Bloody Prequel

Earlier this year, director Ti West released X, his first horror film in six years. Six month later, he’s already got a follow-up.

In fact, it’s a prequel to X titled Pearl. The first film — which made my list of the best films of the first half of 2022 — was about a group of enterprising young pornographers in the 1970s who rent out a house on a remote farm to use as a shooting location and wind up getting hacked to pieces by a killer. In that film, Mia Goth played Pearl, who was one half of the elderly couple that owned the farm.

In Pearl, Goth plays the young Pearl and shows how she wound up in the state we found her in during X. West actually shot both movies back-to-back; he started writing the script with Goth during production on X, in part to better understand the Pearl character. Then he brought the screenplay to A24 and they gave him the go-ahead to make it.

The trailer for the film is below and it promises another violent slasher film. I think someone literally explodes in this movie? I’m not sure what I’m looking at here…

Here is the film’s official synopsis:

Filmmaker Ti West returns with another chapter from the twisted world of X, in this astonishing follow-up to the year’s most acclaimed horror film. Trapped on her family’s isolated farm, Pearl must tend to her ailing father under the bitter and overbearing watch of her devout mother. Lusting for a glamorous life like she’s seen in the movies, Pearl’s ambitions, temptations, and repressions all collide, in the stunning, technicolor-inspired origin story of X’s iconic villain.

Pearl is scheduled to open in theaters on September 16.

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