If you’re going to take someone’s word on the state of horror films today, Kevin Bacon (who, among other things, starred in the original Friday the 13th) feels like a reliable source. And the veteran actor and MaXXXine star thinks that the genre, in the year 2024, is “as good as it’s ever been.”
Says Bacon, “I think for many years it was considered, like, a loser part of filmmaking — it would never make its way into the awards sphere and it would never be embraced by anything other than horror fans, and it’s not something that is going to draw good actors and filmmakers. And that’s really clearly not the case anymore. When you look at filmmakers like Ti West and Jordan Peele, you can see that these are artists.”
MaXXXine, the newest from the aforementioned Ti West, completes the director’s trilogy of films starring Mia Goth as two different aspiring actresses from different time periods. In 2022’s X, Goth played the dual roles of young porn star Maxine and the elderly (and homicidal) Pearl, while Pearl (released six months later) flashed back to Pearl as a young woman in 1918, desperate for her big break. The third movie catches up with Maxine in the year 1985, as she struggles to escape the stigma of working in adult films with a role in a mainstream horror movie — while also contending with a serial killer on the loose in Hollywood.
Bacon appears in MaXXXine, as a shady private detective sent to track down Maxine, because he was already a fan of West’s work. “I was really knocked out by how tonally different [X and Pearl] were,” he says. “So I just basically said, ‘Can I have a meeting with him?’ Not knowing anything about MaXXXine. My people were able to get in touch with him, and we sat down, and I said, ‘Listen, I just like your movies.’ And he said, ‘Well, there is a movie that I’m doing, it’s part of the trilogy, and I’ll send it to you.'”
The first two films were critically acclaimed by more people than Kevin Bacon when they came out, though cast member Elizabeth Debicki says that “I hadn’t seen them because I am really wussy with horror. A lot of people I knew and love and really respect their taste had been telling me about Ti’s work, but I hadn’t had the courage.”
The irony here is that she plays Elizabeth Bender, an intense and focused horror director who casts Maxine in her new project. And fortunately enough, she was open to reading the MaXXXine script, which she read “really fast. I loved it. I thought it was extremely entertaining, and then I kind of educated myself retrospectively. I watched [Pearl and X] and I met Ti. I loved him. He’s very self-assured in a really excellent way — he was very confident about the film he wanted to make.”
MaXXXine (A24)
Debicki was surprised yet pleased to get the opportunity to work on MaXXXine, she says, because “it felt very cool, and I’d been doing a very different kind of work for some time… it was very easy to say yes.”
And one thing she really loved about the film was “how astute the commentary is. It’s often quite self-aware, and I love that Ti wrote a director character who’s both aware of her own ambitions and her sense of repulsion with the industry — but at the same time, her need to make it work for her. She’s very self-aware, and at the same time she isn’t. I think that can be true of a lot of people working in this industry, and I like that she’s a mouthpiece for that. I found that refreshing. He’s sort of nodding and winking the whole time at Hollywood in the film, and that’s really entertaining, I think.”
Bacon also loves the way that MaXXXine leans into the artifice of filmmaking, particularly the sequences shot at two different Hollywood studios (Universal and Warner Bros.) that do not at all disguise the fact that they’re shooting on working backlots and soundstages.
“It’s the greatest,” he says. “One of my favorite things is that the first time [Maxine] sees me [on the backlot] is on a Western street, and it’s shot in this Sergio Leone kind of way. And it’s a tiny little Easter egg, but there’s a horse that’s walking by, and there’s also two guys carrying a coffin. I loved it. I thought it was so clever and so fun.”
In addition to those meta touches, Debicki says that she felt like West had written himself into the character of the director “to some degree.” And, while she’s quick to say that she’s never directly discussed this perspective with her director, she took a lot from Elizabeth Bender’s perspective on horror as “a possible Trojan horse for really exploring interesting ideas on screen. I sort of feel like that’s what Ti’s been doing with this trilogy. He understands this genre inside out.”
Adds Debicki, “There’s a line in the movie where [Elizabeth Bender] says ‘It’s a B movie with A ideas.’ There’s this kind of flipness to it, and also knowing that you are very, very clever at what you’re doing — that sort of reminds me a little bit of Ti, to be honest. He is so, so clever and very unassuming, but extremely sure. And I think, I think that’s probably in a way where she comes from. But unlike [my character], Ti is lovely and very softly spoken and would never, would never chew up one of his actors.”
MaXXXine (A24)
A relatively fresh actor cast by West was Moses Sumney, who plays Maxine’s confidante Leon. Sumney might be better known for his music, receiving a lot of praise and attention for his albums Græ and Aromanticism, but announced in 2022 that he’d be taking a hiatus from music to focus on other projects.
“During the pandemic, I started studying acting from my house in North Carolina,” he says. “And I really just felt like if I went for it, it would work out. Soon after that, I ended up in The Idol, and then auditioned for this movie. It was crazy, just a couple years after I started studying and reading about acting, to have the honor of doing this. It’s really difficult to find complex and unique Black characters in a lot of modern cinema — I felt like Leon was a really unique character that I hadn’t fully seen before. He’s cool, but he is also a nerd.” He laughs. “I really related to the idea of being cool but a total loser at the same time.”
According to Sumney, he used to tell people he didn’t like horror movies, but while shooting MaXXXine, his friends started challenging him on that, mentioning movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Hereditary that he admitted to loving. “By the end of the conversation it was like, ‘Oh wait, I actually love horror movies,'” he says. “I didn’t realize it because I hadn’t been a horror fan in the traditional or communal sense.” While, like Debicki, he also hadn’t seen X or Pearl until MaXXXine came up, he loved both movies — “I absolutely fell in love with Pearl, especially.”
One reason Debicki thinks West’s take on horror might be more palatable for non-horror fans is that “they’re first and foremost performance pieces. I think it’s really satisfying for me, as an actress, to watch work like that — to watch Mia’s work is really mesmerizing, and it’s fun to see the scope of the performance. I find it satisfying to be able to watch actresses really work like that. That’s the leading thing about these films for me, the horror in a way is very affecting, but it almost comes second to the story, to the performance and also to the tone.”
Also, she observes, “all three have such distinct tones — that’s also very entertaining. The thing about MaXXXine that I really appreciate is that because it’s so ’80s, it signals to you a lot — it’s constantly communicating with the audience. So I knew when something scary was going to happen. I really appreciate that, because when I watch horror films, it’s just like so jumpy. I can’t do it. I’m out of the room.”
Working on MaXXXine has made Debicki a bit more open to watching horror movies, though. “Since I’ve made this film, I’ve actually done a bit of a retrospective. Modern-day horror I find harder — it’s just so gritty and it can have so much gore. I don’t do well with gore. I don’t like it imprinted on my brain, so I sort of avoid it. But older horror, there’s some incredible filmmaking in that genre,” she says.
She also has a theory as to “why it’s so popular at the moment in Hollywood. I think MaXXXine is the perfect example of this: It’s extremely fun to watch it with other people. To not watch this film in a cinema would be such a missed opportunity, for a really good time. I am all for getting people back into the cinema. And so I think that this genre works for that at the moment.”
Bacon expresses similar feelings, and hopes for MaXXXine’s theatrical future. “I love movies. They’re my life’s work. And we’re at a difficult time in terms of that — to see the theater business shrinking, I have a kind of sadness about that,” he says.
Especially because, he adds, “This movie brought that back up for me in a funny way. This was my era — you know, me here in Hollywood, shooting an ’85 movie and getting a chance to play a great part and know that it was going to be on the screens, and that there were going to be strangers in the dark, sitting there watching it. I think that filmmaking is a great important art that we have to continue to support in any way that we can. I don’t want to see it go away.”
MaXXXine arrives in theaters on July 3rd.