Support Us
Sign Up
The A24 trailer for MaXXXine, the long-anticipated final installment in Ti West’s American slasher horror trilogy, has just dropped. If you remember X and Pearl (both released in 2022), you’ll know West has a panache for unabashed back-to-basics gory, vintage horror.
West doesn’t shy away from the close-up scenes of killers hacking bodies into tiny pieces. West leans into the 70s and 80s B-Movie allusions with nods to classic horrors like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He doesn’t shy away from sex and nudity. But he still manages to turn these same-old horror tropes on their head. X, for instance, is perhaps the only horror film in which a missionary sex scene between an old-time married couple is one of the film’s grimiest and darkest moments. If he pulls off MaXXXine, West may go down as the director who made one of the great horror trilogies.
Watch the MaXXXine Trailer
A24 has been dragging the film’s promotion out for a long time with fleeting teasers that offer glimpses of MaXXXine‘s Hollywood setting. One teaser showed Maxine’s name lighting up the Hollywood hills in place of the iconic Hollywood sign. Now, A24 has released the full trailer, and it promises to be a bold and bloody rebuke to all things staid and cliched in horror films.
The trailer quickly re-introduces us to Maxine Minx, played by the astonishingly talented Mia Goth. If you’ve watched X and Pearl, you’ll know that Goth has already played a riotous carousel of horror heroes in West’s films. She’s the glue that holds West’s horror trilogy together. MaXXXine opens in Hollywood in the mid-1980s at the height of slasher horror franchises pulling in box office figures. West’s star is the same heroine from the first film, Maxine Minx.
MaXXXine Trailer Reaction
In X, Maxine was the lead in a grimy, low-budget adult film being shot in an isolated Texas farmhouse. Six years after the bloody aftermath of events at the farmhouse, Maxine wants to escape her past and make it big in Hollywood. She’s gaining a reputation and has been cast in a Hollywood horror movie that promises to be ‘the defining role of her career’.
Maxine’s on the cusp of the stardom she’s always yearned for. Yet her past threatens to catch up with her in the form of a brooding private detective investigating her antics in X (complete with a Pink Panther-style mustache and glasses). Maxine will be the film’s hero and villain that takes her name. But we’ll have to wait until summer to see how much bloodshed she unleashes in the Hollywood hills.
There are affectionate homages to the horror genre peppered throughout MaXXXine‘s trailer. Maxine wants to join the line-up of famous horror actresses like Jamie-Lee Curtis, Demi Moore, and Brooke Shields, and the film harks back to vintage 80s horror B-movies about crazed killers and final girls. It’s the era of blockbusters, slasher films, great music, and Hollywood stars. Yet MaXXXine emphasizes the dark underside of the 1980s. The film’s backdrop is the real-life pursuit of the American serial killer, the Night Stalker, which plays out on TV screens. The Night Stalker’s crime spree took place in the mid-1980s in Los Angeles. West is using this backdrop to allude to the grimy, dark underworld lurking just beyond the orbs of the bright Hollywood lights.
West’s films are like beautiful melodies that evoke and synthesize a harmonic range of notes before drifting, almost unnoticeably, off-key before descending into an acutely high-pitched, terrifying discord. MaXXXine‘s trailer, despite its short length, slips seamlessly between melody and discord, with a color palette that nods to horror classics like Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). As always, West’s antenna is sharply attuned to the expectations of horror audiences, and he capitalizes on color and atmosphere in ways that promise to build upon, and even exceed, the fiery violence of X and Pearl.
MaXXXine promises to be a deliciously twisted love letter to horror’s cinematic pop culture. West is never one to rely on the same old tricks that are cliches in the horror genre. West is always reinventing himself, and if the trailer’s anything to go by, MaXXXine will be a dark, gory technicolor nightmare that will draw in the summer cinema crowds.
MaXXXine
Six years after the 'Texas Pornhouse Massacre', Maxine is now LA-based and on a driven quest to become a star in the acting world. But things take a sinister turn when bodies once again begin to fall around her.
