The stars and director of X talk about marking the spot between sex and violence in horror
Brittany Snow, Martin Henderson, and Ti West on the “symbiotic relationship” shared by horror and porn

Over eight films and more than a dozen episodes of television, Ti West has established himself as one of the moviemaking industry’s most skillful manipulators of genre—horror in particular—by reinventing tropes, imagery, and familiar scenarios to tell new stories for contemporary audiences. Where before he breathed new life into the “Satanic panic” subgenre with House Of The Devil and ghost stories in The Innkeepers, his latest offers a new take on the slasher film. In X, a low-budget ’70s adult-film production gets interrupted when the hosts of the shoot get uncomfortably interested in its stars. Mia Goth (Suspiria) leads an ensemble cast including Brittany Snow, Martin Henderson, Scott Mescudi, and Jenna Ortega as they both navigate the vagaries of the porn industry and fight for their lives against assailants who are none too pleased by their guests’ choice of vocation—but not for the reasons you think.
The A.V. Club spoke to West and stars Snow and Henderson on the day of X’s premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. In addition to discussing his inspirations for this particular (and particularly bloody) film, West explained his approach to the familiar ideas and images he hopes to reimagine, while Snow and Henderson talked about the atmosphere on a set where sex and violence are so inextricably linked, as well as their own feelings about the deeper themes explored between those two extremes.
The A.V. Club: Ti, one of the things you’ve always been really skilled at is borrowing the conventions of a familiar genre and giving them a contemporary update. Can you talk about what the original idea was that inspired you with this film?
Ti West: Well, I had made seven horror movies in a row and I wanted to take a break. So I did almost a 10-year break. But I never made a slasher movie. That felt like uncharted territory for me. I had been thinking a lot about if I was to make another horror movie again, why would I do it? And I was thinking that I really liked just like the craft of cinema in general, and I wanted to make a movie about filmmaking because I feel like there’s a lack of cultural reverence for cinema, maybe because we’re just so bombarded with moving images all of the time. But I didn’t want to make a movie about people making a horror movie because that’s too meta and uninteresting to me. And horror and porn have always had this symbiotic relationship of being outsider genres, so I thought in a slasher movie—as the lowbrow combination of sex and violence—a story about the adult film industry made sense. And that was a way for me to bring an audience in, to watch people make a movie and see how making movie is different than the movie that ends up on screen. And then I just felt like horror movies were kind of soft. And so in that I was like, “Well, if you’re going to make a slasher movie, you gotta just go right for it.” So that just started nagging at my brain, and then here we are.
AVC: This is a movie where people who have sex get killed, but they don’t necessarily get killed because they have sex, at least not in the way they might in a Friday The 13th movie. What tropes did you want to reinvent or turn on their ear in portraying this group of adult filmmakers and their eventual antagonists?
TW: My general feeling was to set up a movie that you think you know what it’s gonna be and then have it be something totally different. And I think from a character standpoint, it was to take these archetypes of slasher movies and then make them more like real people and not have it be like, okay, the person that obviously is going to have this happen to them, the opposite happens in this movie.
AVC: At this moment in their careers, Brittany and Martin’s characters are still more or less amateur pornographers. Were there any current or historic figures in the porn industry that you referenced or drew upon to play Bobby-Lynne and Wayne?
Brittany Snow: Ti and I initially talked a lot at length about how an attribute that Dolly Parton had was she knew what she had, she knew how to use it, and she could turn it off at any time. She’s smart enough to know how to read a room and utilize her intelligence and her body for her benefit. And she also knew that she was smarter than what people thought she was, and her superpower in a way was that people were going to underestimate her and she was going to overdeliver. And so that that was a lot that we used for as a character for Bobby-Lynne, of someone who’s at a time when the blonde bombshell type of person could be seen a certain way, but it’s all in her own narrative, in her own control of how she’s using it.
Martin Henderson: Well, like you said, they are novices. And so I think for the character of Wayne, it wasn’t so much of looking to any historical person in the adult film industry. Maybe a used car salesman is more in keeping with how I saw this sort of enthusiastic, ultimately optimistic and positive guy, but nothing had really worked out for him in the way that he had hoped. And so there was almost like a naïveté to the character and a slickness that works for him, but also puts some people off—which I found comical, that he’s unaware of that until he’s called out for it. So I didn’t look at it so much through the lens of a pornographer as an opportunist and someone who still believes.