The Farmer's Daughter

All our Xs live in Texas! Ti West tells all about Pearl...

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“I DON’T THINK WE EVER ONCE considered Pearl as the villain,” says Ti West, director of one of the year’s most anticipated horror movies. It’s a slightly surprising admission given that Mia Goth’s titular character is, after all, an occasionally axe-wielding murderer in X. Still, anyone who caught that film on its US release last September will know exactly what he means.

Pearl is the second instalment in a trilogy that will conclude with the upcoming MaXXXine. It was shot at the same time as the first flick and is set on the same isolated Texas homestead, albeit some 61 years previously, and Pearl isn’t yet the monster we know she’ll become. Instead, she’s an aspiring dancer, with dreams of making it big in Hollywood.

“The whole goal of this is for you to be on her side, despite what she does,” says West. “When it was starting to come together in the edit, I’d show it to friends and they were all rooting for her. That’s such a testament to Mia. You’re like, ‘Well, I hope everything’s going to work out…’”

Prequels, of course, are rarely surprising. By their very nature, you know where a story is headed. Pearl, however, manages to upend expectations thanks to its wild shift in tone. Where X was a brutal slasher, in debt to the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,