X · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

X grounds its horror not in darkness but in the politics of looking. West builds the film around the gaze — in Laura Mulvey's sense, the camera's habit of looking with desire — and then literalizes it: his characters are a porn crew who have made visibility itself their enterprise, while Pearl, the elderly landlady, kills because she has been expelled from the desiring gaze that Maxine and the other performers inhabit without effort. The violence isn't random; it is the eruption of someone who was once seen and is no longer. West encodes this not through exposition but through mise-en-scène: cinematographer Eliot Rockett's compositions return obsessively to doublings and mirror-rhymes — split framings, paired arrangements — so that Pearl and Maxine are held in visual correspondence long before the film names them as shadows of each other, two women separated by fifty years and a culture that only wants to look at one of them. The period grammar — wide patient framing, slow zooms, lamp-lit interiors — is itself a genre argument: a deliberate layering of two disreputable 1970s cycles, the backwoods slasher and the golden-age pornographic feature. West's debt to Tobe Hooper is worn openly in the sun-scorched 16mm grain and the decaying farmhouse presided over by an unseen predatory elder, but he folds the porn aesthetic inside that inheritance to make a single claim — that both kinds of filmmaking were always about the same thing: who gets to be desired, who is punished for desire, and who controls the frame.