Way back when I managed to see Ti West’s X at the South By Southwest film festival, I had no idea I was sitting down to watch part one of a planned trilogy. But West surprised audiences that night by revealing that a prequel to X already had been filmed, and that Pearl would arrive in theaters months later. Pearl explored the origins of a mysterious character lurking in the shadows of X, and the story isn’t ending there. As we learned, the well-reviewed Pearl was laying the groundwork for the upcoming A24 movie MaXXXine, and now we have a trailer to suggest the direction in which Mia Goth’s character is heading.
Here’s the full trailer for Ti West’s captivating MaXXXine:
Ti West’s movies in this trilogy so far have paid homage to specific and beloved periods in the horror genre, and MaXXXine looks to follow a similar blueprint. With the story following Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) to Hollywood, this is giving West the opportunity to spoof the film industry, recreating gory genre cinema while also dropping Goth into what looks to be a classic 1980s slasher mystery.
Per the plot synopsis, a mysterious night stalker will be taking to the seedy streets of Hollywood to hunt starlets, but tangling with Maxine – based on that we saw in X – is likely going to be a problem for the stalker.
I was born in the 1970s, and grew up on the VHS tapes to which Ti West is paying homage in MaXXXine. I’m here to tell you, he has nailed the look and feel of the late-night Skin-emax cable movies that we’d record and rewatch religiously. It’s why this shot from the trailer, of blood spattering across a line of VHS tapes, really caught my eye.
Would you like even more reasons to be excited for MaXXXine? When describing the upcoming horror movie, director Ti West compared it to perhaps one of the scariest movies released in that decade – James Cameron’s The Terminator. And if you remember how terrifying the relentless Terminator was in the original film, before Cameron embraced the sci-fi mythology of that world, you know what to expect from this film.
But will this be the end of the road for Mia Goth and her filmmaker? Perhaps not, as West already has started to lay the groundwork for another story that’s attached to this thread. So long as these two want to keep collaborating on movies, we will turn up to see what they have in story. Look for MaXXXine when it opens in theaters on July 5.
