The ascent of so-called “elevated horror”, a nonsense term vaguely referring to a loose collection of films that smack of the highbrow in a way that your average down-and-dirty murder-fest does not, has yielded a handful of strong entries. But the flip side of that blood-flecked coin has been an increased privileging of subtext over text, as the most dreary of the bunch get bogged down in their smarty-pants metaphors at the cost of the genre’s more immediate pleasures. Too many perfectly good premises have been squandered, so busy pondering the lingering effects of trauma that they forget to scare the bejesus out of their viewers.
With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified. When a film-maker opens their movie with a van’s worth of fresh-faced 70s porn stars stopping for an ominous gas-up at a petrol station en route to a secluded house in the woods, a promise is made. There will be skin, and then we’ll get to watch as it’s lacerated. West delivers on that unspoken compact and then some, generally with a winning spirit of invention and inspiration calibrated for maximum audience response. If there’s a deeper meaning at play in this face-off between the merry band of degenerates and the fundamentalist oldsters picking them off, it concerns the freedom to indulge in all things prurient and lurid without shame, a god-given right exercised in gleeful fashion here. Art, trash, prestige – these are all just words, and they’re holding us back.
