Giallo films and LA thrillers: the movies to watch if you loved Ti West’s ‘MaXXXine’
In delivering the third movie in his X horror series, Ti West rounded off a brilliant few years from a personal and creative perspective. The highly anticipated MaXXXine, which followed on from 2022’s X and its prequel movie Pearl, saw Mia Goth reprise her role as Maxine Minx; only that time, she was in Hollywood heading for the big time.
MaXXXine takes place six years after the events of X and sees Maxine tied up in the serial killings of the ‘Night Stalker’ while her shady history threatens to ruin her quest to become a star. With a brilliant cast including Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Lily Collins and Kevin Bacon, MaXXXine continued to cement West’s place in the hallway of modern horror greats.
Speaking with Variety, West revealed the kind of movies that inspired the aesthetics of MaXXXine, noting, “When you’re trying to recreate the 1980s aesthetic, what you’re also recreating is a sense of the media of the time.” Although West admitted that the influences for MaXXXine were “less specific” than one might think, he couldn’t help but admit to the brilliance of Brian De Palma’s Body Double, which he called “a really great, rich, aesthetic movie that takes place in Hollywood, behind the scenes of moviemaking.”
Indeed, De Palma’s 1984 neo-noir erotic thriller starring Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Melanie Griffith and Deborah Shelton takes place in the Hollywood Hills and tells of a young actor who becomes obsessed with spying on a beautiful woman who lives in the area, with De Palma paying homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo.
In a broader sense, West also noted, “Giallo movies obviously play a role, as far as black-gloved killers and things like that.” Giallo movies are murder mystery films that contain facets from the slasher, thriller, psychological horror and exploitation genres and include the likes of Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage/Deep Red, Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling and William Friedkin’s Cruising.
Then West had also spoken of the movies that serve as “time capsules of Hollywood”, the kind of films that simultaneously show an audience “the glamorous side of LA and the non-glamorous side, that work as almost research of what it looked like at the time.” The director then proceeded to name three movies that fit into this subgenre.
West began with Gary Sherman’s 1982 exploitation crime thriller Vice Squad, starring Wings Hauser, Season Hubley and Gary Swanson, which tells of an LA businesswoman-turned-sex worker who the LAPD hires to track down a murderous, sexist pimp. 1984’s Angel, directed by Robert Vincent O’Neil, starring Donna Wilkes, Cliff Gorman and Rory Calhoun, also tells of a teen LA prostitute who faces the danger of a serial killer on the loose.
Such films play into the influence of MaXXXine in their focus on Hollywood and sex work, and West rounded off his list of inspirations for the final part of the X original trilogy with his respect for Adrian Lyne’s 1980 coming-of-age work Foxes, starring Jodie Foster, Randy Quaid, and Cherie Currie. It tells of a group of teenage girls coming of age at the end of the 1970s.
Movies to watch if you loved MaXXXine
- Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984)
- Vice Squad (Gary Sherman, 1982)
- Angel (Robert Vincent O’Neil, 1984)
- Foxes (Adrian Lyne, 1980)
- The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970)
- Deep Red (Dario Argento, 1975)
- Don’t Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)
- Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980)
