Ti West’s X trilogy—X (2022), Pearl (2022), and Maxxxine (2024)—was a highlight of American horror film in the first half of the 2020s. The trilogy appeared when the wave of "elevated" horror films that had been the hallmark of American cinema earlier in the new century was just beginning to regain momentum after the entire film industry had been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Though at first glance the X trilogy seems to have more in common with 1970s grindhouse films and 1980s slashers than contemporary prestige horror, authors M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh argue that the films of West’s franchise are aesthetically complex works of art continuing in the modern tradition established by such filmmakers as Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, and Robert Eggers. Through careful and detailed analyses of these three stylistically distinct yet thematically linked productions, Booker and Daraiseh reveal the depths of each film’s critiques of sexualized violence, social conservatism, and failed utopianism—critiques which gain even deeper, more philosophically profound resonance when those films are seen as part of a connected series full of intertextual references and intratextual reverberations. The authors examine the ways in which the films parlay an extensive engagement with past cinema into a critical dialogue with ways of thinking about American history—and especially with the growing tendency for American historical thought to be dominated by nostalgic visions. Ultimately, the volume positions the X trilogy as a sophisticated meditation on history, fantasy, and cultural memory, both critiquing and mirroring the broader American struggle to confront the past.
