X: Ti West Shot a Secret Horror Prequel To His New Slasher Film

by Dojo! March 15, 2022 · Automatic

Ti West has revealed that he secretly filmed a prequel to his new A24 slasher film X, titled Pearl, and is currently writing the third entry in the unexpected new franchise.

Ti West’s X made its debut at the SXSW Film Festival this week and, according to IndieWire, the filmmaker has plans to expand upon the story with both a prequel and a sequel. The prequel was written a few weeks before cameras started rolling on X and it has already been shot with Mia Goth reprising her role, though this time, playing a younger version of Pearl, the spooky old woman in the first movie.

“I’m trying to build a world out of all this, like people do these days,” he said in an interview. “You can’t make a slasher movie without a bunch of sequels.”

X stars Jenna Ortega, Mia Goth, Brittany Snow, Scott Mescudi, and more. The film is set in 1979 and follows a group of young filmmakers as they set out to make an adult film in rural Texas. However, they find their production is disrupted when their reclusive, elderly hosts catch them in the act, leaving the cast of the movie’s X-rated picture to fight for their lives.

According to IndieWire, West shot the movie’s prequel, Pearl, on the same set as X, which was filmed with the Avatar 2 crew during a break. Pearl is described as a Douglas Sirk-inspired “Technicolor, ‘Mary Poppins’ kind of movie” that “promises to fill in some of the gaps, exploring how the cabin where the massacre of X takes place was a boarding house during WWI.”

“If ‘X’ is about the way this auteurist era of independent filmmaking is affecting people, ‘Pearl’ is sort of about the old Hollywood way that affected people,” West revealed. “The way in which they enrich each other is all a part of the craft of the filmmaking. I wanted to do something where all of the crafts of the movie were their very apparent charms.”

Pearl is expected to be fully completed by May, having already wrapped production and finished the editing process. West has wasted no time in jumping straight into the third entry of his new film series, a sequel to X, that will explore another filmmaking era. He is currently writing the story, which will focus on “how home video has affected people.”

A24 will be releasing X in theaters on March 18, together with a sneak peek of the prequel that will be screened alongside West’s new slasher.

Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.