Give Ti West this: He’s completed the quickest trilogy in contemporary horror movie history. Barely two years after X introduced us to its gore-soaked version of the MCU—that’d be the Maxine Cinematic Universe, named for the ornery and resourceful would-be-porn-star-cum–Final Girl embodied by Mia Goth—West has jerry-rigged a triptych whose conceptual sturdiness and artistic merit are, if far from certain, at least worthy of debate. With the release of MaXXXine , the question is whether West has truly succeeded in carving out a niche of his own or whether his series is just a (figuratively) bloodless exercise in received themes and aesthetics.
To return to the initial film: There was plenty to like about X , which took a lurid, high-concept premise—i.e., what if Boogie Nights was drenched in more crimson bodily fluids?—and used it to limn the practical and spiritual overlap between two kindred and disreputable forms of cinema (that’d be horror and porn).
Nostalgia and sleaze are a potent combination, and the spectacle of nubile, solipsistic exhibitionists being systematically eviscerated by the wizened, married homesteaders whose farm they’d commandeered for a skin-flick shoot nodded to vintage traditions. (For extra ’70s resonance, there was even a cover of “Landslide.”) The ace up West’s sleeve, meanwhile, was hidden in plain view: By casting Goth in a dual role as both a hard-edged starlet and a catatonic, knife-wielding crone—the latter of whom .
