Pearl: Ti West’s horror prequel to X turns a farm girl’s movie-star dream into murder

Ti West’s 2022 prequel gives the elderly killer of X a past: a Texas farm in 1918, a strict mother, the Spanish flu and a dream of the movies, shot in secret in New Zealand with Mia Goth as both star and co-writer.

Pearl is the story of a killer before anyone has noticed her. Ti West’s horror film, written with its star Mia Goth, follows a young woman on a Texas farm who nurses her paralysed father, obeys a severe German immigrant mother and waits for a husband fighting in Europe, while the only escape within reach is the picture house in town and the life its screen seems to promise. The year is 1918, the Spanish flu keeps the family shut away, and the young woman is the same Pearl who, decades later and as an old woman, terrorises a film crew in X, the slasher West released earlier in 2022.

A farm, an alligator and an audition

The plot follows Pearl as the distance between her dream and her daily life becomes unbearable. Her mother, Ruth, disapproves of any talk of dancing or film stardom and runs the household on duty and self-denial. Pearl’s frustration has already found ugly outlets. She mistreats her father when nobody is looking, kills animals around the farm and feeds them to an alligator that lives in the pond, a creature she has nicknamed Theda, after the silent-era star Theda Bara.

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Two encounters push the story forward. In town she meets a projectionist who flatters her ambitions and shows her a forbidden stag film, and her wealthy sister-in-law Mitsy tells her about an audition for a travelling dance troupe on the other side of the state. A small lie about eight cents spent on a movie ticket grows into a family confrontation, and the argument at the dinner table is the point at which the film leaves melodrama behind and enters slasher territory.

Without giving away every turn, the second half follows Pearl’s attempt to get off the farm and what happens when the world outside answers her with a no. The audition, the confession that follows it and the eventual homecoming of her husband, Howard, close the story on a protracted, pained smile that became the film’s best-known image and the shorthand for the character ever since.

A prequel shot in secret during the pandemic

Pearl exists because of an unusual production decision. West began writing it while he was still making X, developing a backstory for the character together with Goth, who in the first film plays two roles: the young performer Maxine and, under heavy prosthetics, the elderly Pearl. West has said he was not sure at first whether that story would become a film of its own or simply remain background for the actor. The COVID-19 pandemic settled the question.

X was being shot in New Zealand, at that moment one of the few places on Earth where a film could be made safely, and West pitched A24 the idea of turning his slasher into a series in which every instalment would have its own style and its own kind of horror. The studio agreed. Pearl went before the cameras immediately after X wrapped, on the same sets and with crew members from Avatar: The Way of Water who were on a break from James Cameron‘s production. Nobody announced it. The film was revealed with a surprise teaser in March 2022, when X premiered at the SXSW festival in Austin.

The production companies were A24 and Little Lamb, the company of Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria and director of Assassination Nation, who is credited as an executive producer alongside Mia Goth and Kid Cudi, whose Mad Solar Productions also backed the film. The producers were Jacob Jaffke, Kevin Turen, Harrison Kreiss and West himself, who also edited the film, as he had edited X.

Douglas Sirk, Technicolor and a demented Disney movie

If X drew on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and on the Italian horror of Mario Bava, Pearl looks somewhere else entirely. West described it as Douglas Sirk melodrama meeting the Technicolor style of The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins, a “demented Disney movie” about the way Hollywood images shape the people who consume them. The premise is built for that idea: a farm girl in 1918 belongs to one of the first generations raised on moving pictures, and her picture of who she ought to be comes straight off the screen.

A useful comparison is older still. The Night of the Hunter, from 1955, the only film Charles Laughton directed, is another rural American nightmare that borrowed the look of an earlier cinema to tell a cruel story, and it belongs to the same small family of horror films that treat their visual design as seriously as their body count. Pearl is not the first horror film to try that, and nothing in its production history suggests it wanted to be; what it adds is the decision to make the borrowed look part of the character, since the films Pearl dreams about are the films it imitates.

The music follows the same logic. Tyler Bates, who had also worked on the music of X, and Tim Williams recorded an orchestral score in Nashville after SXSW, naming classical Hollywood composers such as Bernard Herrmann, John Barry, Henry Mancini, Ennio Morricone and Maurice Jarre as their references. Where X used Chelsea Wolfe’s cover of the First World War song “Oui, Oui, Marie”, Pearl uses the original recording by Arthur Fields, heard inside the story. Eliot Rockett, the cinematographer of X, shot the film, and the costumes were designed by Malgosia Turzanska.

Mia Goth, co-writer as well as star

Pearl is, above all, a vehicle for Mia Goth, who had worked with Luca Guadagnino on Suspiria and with Claire Denis on High Life before her collaboration with West. Here she is credited as co-writer and executive producer as well as lead, and the awards record shows how the role was received. She won Best Actress at the Sitges festival in Catalonia, where West took Best Direction, and was later named best actress in a horror movie and best villain at the Critics’ Choice Super Awards, with a nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards and several more from critics’ associations. The screenplay she wrote with West was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.

The part of the film most discussed since its release is Pearl’s long confession to Mitsy, a monologue that interviews with the actor have treated as the core of the role. It is the moment the script stops showing Pearl from the outside and lets her explain herself, in her own words, to the one person in her life who has what she wants.

The supporting cast is small, as the setting demands. Tandi Wright plays Ruth, Matthew Sunderland plays Pearl’s father, Emma Jenkins-Purro plays Mitsy and Alistair Sewell plays Howard, the absent husband. The projectionist is played by David Corenswet, three years before he put on the cape in James Gunn‘s Superman.

From Venice to MaXXXine

Pearl premiered out of competition at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2022, and opened in US cinemas through A24 on September 16, six months after X. It runs 102 minutes. It debuted in third place at the North American box office with $3.1 million and went on to gross about $10.1 million, with Universal Pictures handling the international release. It was runner-up for the Midnight Madness audience award at the Toronto festival, Eliot Rockett won the Boston Society of Film Critics prize for cinematography for Pearl and X together, and the film was named best independent film at the Saturn Awards.

The series continued with MaXXXine, released on July 5, 2024, a direct sequel to X in which Goth returned as Maxine. Seen next to its two companions, Pearl is the odd one out: a period piece, a melodrama in bright colours and the instalment told from the killer’s side rather than the victims’.

What it sets out to do is clear from its premise and from the way it was made: take a figure introduced as a monster in a slasher set in 1979, and give her a past, a family and a fantasy life, using the visual vocabulary of the films she would have grown up with. Whether that adds up to sympathy for Pearl, or only to a sharper kind of horror, is the question the film leaves with its audience.

Direction

Cast

Mia Goth / Pearl	David Corenswet / The Projectionist	Tandi Wright / Ruth
Matthew Sunderland / Pearl’s Father	Emma Jenkins-Purro / Mitzy	Alistair Sewell / Howard

Tags: Mia Goth, David Corenswet, Sam Levinson

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