14 minute read
"THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER"
Horror on the farm in Ti West’s X and Pearl
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Content warning: gendered violence
Two years ago this October, I left my home in Brooklyn and drove to Maine to volunteer on a farm for two months. Being from the city, I had always romanticized farms as a form of escape, a way to get out of the city into something peaceful, quiet, and beautiful. I hoped it would be a reprieve from the stress of urban life and a way to connect with the natural world. I imagined spending time with the farm animals, cooking with produce I helped grow myself, going for walks in the countryside.
As I passed through the White Mountains in early October, it seemed like the country would be everything I had convinced myself it would be. Fall had arrived and the trees were emblazoned with vibrant shades of autumnal oranges and reds. But when I finally got to the farm, something felt off. It was eerily remote, and the nearest town was miles away. Most of the crops had died, replaced by curled-up brown leaves in hardened soil. A row of sunflowers had started to wilt and turn black. Sheep peered at me from a distance behind an electric fence, eyes glinting. As much as I wanted the farm to be the idealized version I had in my head, I was gripped with unease. Instead of the tranquil escape I had expected, it felt like I had just entered the set of a horror film.
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Last month, A24 released its latest slasher, Pearl. Directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth, Pearl tells the story of a farm girl growing up in 1918 with the hopes of making it big. Pearl’s husband Howard is away at war, leaving Pearl to work on her family’s farm. To her, the farm is a prison she is desperate to escape. She is forced to take care of her father who has become paralyzed from a past illness. Her mother, an immigrant from Germany, is intensely religious and controlling. Pearl’s only reprieve from the farm is when she is sent into town to do errands. There, she sneaks off to the movies, watching films of dancing girls, legs kicked high.
“I want to be special, dancing up on the screen like the pretty girls in the pictures!” Pearl exclaims. She practices her dancing in secret anytime she can. When a big opportunity arises—open auditions to be a dancer in a traveling troupe—she is willing to go to any means necessary to be cast, which she envisions as her only chance to become a star and leave the farm. She performs her dances to the cows, sheep, and geese, playing the role of a charming little farm girl with big dreams. The illusion is quickly broken when a goose looks at her funny at the end of one of her performances, as if questioning her talent. In revenge, she stabs it with a pitchfork and feeds it to the local alligator in the lake. Pearl quickly moves on from animals to humans, killing anyone in her path that prevents her from achieving her goals.
Pearl’s world is a technicolor dreamscape. She exists in a universe similar to Dorothy’s in the Wizard of Oz, filled with vibrant reds, blues, and yellows. The choice to situate Pearl within a technicolor Old Hollywood setting furthers the revulsion and horror of Pearl’s actions by implicitly comparing her to the innocent farm girl of these films. At one point, Pearl chases her sisterin-law Misty, a blonde girl from a wealthy family, with an ax. We see Misty running down the road in front of their house, while Pearl follows her in the background in a bright red dress. This scene is more aesthetically reminiscent of Dorothy and her entourage skipping down the yellow brick road than of a murderer going after their next victim.
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Pearl was created as a prequel to the movie X, also directed by Ti West and starring Mia Goth. A Texas Chainsaw Massacre-inspired slasher, X follows a group of aspiring porn stars and amateur filmmakers who set off from Houston into the countryside with plans to make an X-rated film called “The Farmer’s Daughter.” Mia Goth plays Maxine, the film’s protagonist who, much like Pearl, is determined to become famous. The group rents a cabin on the farm of an elderly couple, Howard (Stephen Ure), and Pearl, who is also played by Mia Goth in prosthetic makeup. The farm is the same farm that Pearl grew up on, with its yellow farmhouse, red barn, and alligator-infested pond. She never escaped, and now she is an old woman, her hair mostly fallen out, her face unrecognizable from age.
In X, when Howard realizes that the group is not just renting out his cabin for a short vacation, he warns them that his wife better not find out what they are up to. The assumption is that he wants to protect his elderly Christian wife from the sinful horrors they are committing. In reality, Pearl is not so innocent. She becomes intensely jealous of Maxine, whom she sees as a younger version of herself. She is angry that she is an old woman and no longer sexually desirable, that she holds no chance to escape this life she hates. Pearl’s murderous streak continues. Supported this time by her husband, they kill off each member of “The Farmer’s Daughter” cast one by one, in true slasher fashion.
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Looking back, it is not surprising that the farm I worked on felt like a horror film. After all, American horror films have been increasingly drawn to the countryside for key reasons. Rural settings have all of the perfect conditions needed to terrify: isolation, darkness, death. This is particularly effective in the classical rural horror film; that is, one in which big city folks travel into the countryside for a pleasant trip and are instead confronted by rural America’s terrifying reality. In the city/countryside horror film— which X falls into more explicitly than Pearl—the countryside exists as an escape for those who live in urban areas, similar to how I had imagined the farm in Maine before I experienced its reality. This divide between the “romanticized” countryside and the “terrifying” countryside more often than not relates to class. The countryside of horror is desolate and impoverished, regions of America that are framed as forgotten by popular media. In this countryside, the horror itself is almost always perpetrated by the rural poor.
Increasingly since the 1970s, rural figures in horror films have become embodiments of the stereotypes that those from cities project onto the rural—that is, southern backwoods men. This is mostly attributed to the release of the slasher film Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974.
The film follows a group of young friends who accidentally encounter and fall victim to a family of cannibals in rural Texas. Supposedly based on true events, the film was shot on 16mm film, adding to its gritty, realist effect. The family in Chainsaw is depicted as a bunch of “hillbillies”: poor, uneducated, and dirty, in direct contrast to the youth, who appear initially as conventionally attractive and clean. The main killer is Leatherface, a nameless, silent man wearing a grotesque mask made of human skin who runs after the kids with a chainsaw. The film marked a new era for horror, as films increasingly adopted its trope of redneck killers chasing after helpless urban youth (The Hills Have Eyes (1977), Cabin in the Woods (2012)).
As Carol Clover, author of the horror theory book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, argues, the assumption for city/country horror films is: “People from the city are people like us. People from the country are people not like us.” This dissonance between people like us (civilized, moral) and people not (barbaric) is physically marked on the body, as these killers are often depicted as ugly—toothless, surly, unshaven. Their appearance is symptomatic of a larger incivility, one which can justify unspeakable violence. As Clover frames it: “In horror, the man who does not take care of his teeth is obvi ously a man who can, and by the end of the movie will, plunder, rape, murder, beat his wife and children, kill within his kin, commit incest, and/or eat human flesh.” Rural people are transformed into revolting figures, devoid of humanity. There’s a sense of fascination for the viewer, to see the extent to which these humans, isolated from civilization, have transformed into monstrous beings.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre was one of the greatest sources of inspiration for West in X. This is clear from one of the first scenes—the crew of “The Farmer’s Daughter,” piled up in a van, driving into the Texas countryside, is taken almost exactly from the opening shot of Chainsaw. Drawing heavily from Chainsaw, West reinforces the trope of the rural as a horrifying “other” in X from the moment Howard and Pearl are introduced. When the group pulls up to the farm, Howard, hidden within the house, points a shotgun at them through the door, accusing them of trespassing. He has seemingly forgotten that he rented out his cabin. When he finally steps into view, it’s shocking. His skin sags and is covered in discoloration, cuts, and bruises. Looking at Howard, Jackson (played by Kid Cudi), the male porn star of “The Farmer’s Daughter,” says, “that’s one ugly son of a bitch.”
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Film critic Robin Wood notes in his essay, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” that rural horror is inherently connected to gender. The killers are men, usually related, such as in Chainsaw. Wood explains how “the absence of woman (conceived of as a civilizing, humanizing influence) deprives the family of its social sense and social meaning while leaving its strength of primitive loyalties largely untouched.” The lack of women within the killers’ lives enables their rugged masculinity, breeding incivility and cravings for violence against women. What makes X and Pearl so compelling is that the killer is not the typical ‘redneck’ man: instead, in Pearl’s character, we find a developed female antagonist who at some points— particularly in Pearl—we are even rooting for. Goth transforms Pearl into a complex figure grappling with unattainable desire—for sex, fame, escape, youth, and violence.
In rural horror films like Chainsaw, the sexuality of rural men is not explored; instead, it is replaced by their desire for murder and cannibalism. In other cases, sexuality is directly linked to male violence against women. Most typically, depictions of female characters center around their innocence.
However, feminine sexual desire is an integral part of Pearl’s character. Her desire for sex and murder both develop from her longing for freedom and escape from the horror of the farm. In Pearl, we see the extent of Pearl’s sexual desire in her youth; one scene even graphically simulates her having sex with a scarecrow. In X, her violence is motivated by her spurned sexual desire, rejected by both her husband Howard, who claims his heart is too weak, and the young visitors, who cringe at her aging body.
X’s Maxine is also far from the usual “final girl”—the term used in horror to describe the last girl in a slasher film, the only one who usually makes it out alive. First coined by Clover in 1992, final girls are usually defined by their moral superiority compared to other characters—they refuse sex, drugs, alcohol, are ‘good girls’—which justifies them being spared by the killer. But Maxine is not in any way innocent. The daughter of a southern preacher, Maxine has turned her back on god and is now a pornstar with a cocaine habit, high on ambition for fame and success. “I’m a fucking star! The whole world is gonna know my name. I will not accept a life I do not deserve,” Maxine yells out to Pearl before attempting to shoot her.
By the end of the film, Maxine and Pearl are the last ones alive—Pearl and Howard have killed Maxine’s friends, and Howard has suffered a heart attack. In a final face-off, Pearl picks up a shotgun and tries to shoot Maxine. She misses, but the recoil from the gun blasts Pearl backwards, onto the driveway outside, breaking her hip. Finally free, Maxine escapes the house and gets into Howard’s truck. Instead of simply driving away, she runs the truck over Pearl’s head, splattering her blood and brains onto the dirt.
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Pearl’s character goes against the trope of rural killers lacking in humanity. She is not just a masked, nameless killer, but a complex person, someone with dreams and deep emotions whose life has become a source of undeniable misery. In Pearl, one believes her when she says she deserves more than this life of cleaning up after animals and giving sponge baths to her father, and roots for her to achieve the stardom she aspires to. Pearl’s desire for escape, for fame, is directly connected to her desire to be loved.
Pearl is willing to do anything to accomplish this dream, including killing both her parents in order to attend her dance audition. However, in the end, she is rejected. She does not have the “X-factor” the judges are looking for. Pearl breaks down. Her sister-in-law Misty takes her home. Sitting in her now empty house, Pearl begins a chilling monologue, her cheeks streaked with mascara.
“I want to be loved by as many people as possible. But truth is, I’m not really a good person,” she tells Misty.
Despite knowing what Pearl has done, and what one expects she is about to do to Misty, it is hard not to sympathize with her. Pearl is horrified of her sexual and violent tendencies. She exhibits a self-awareness that is rare to see in horror movie killers.
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X and Pearl are not revolutionary. They reinforce stereotypes about the rural, continuing the pattern in horror media of the rural as a horrifying ‘other.’ But both films mark a new period in horror, one that both pays tribute to the genre’s past but also expands it into something new, more complex; X and Pearl’s explorations of female-driven horror are far more compelling than the usual slasher. They answer what it would mean for rural horror to shift away from the typical male lens and instead focus on female violence, desire, and sexuality.
Much like the urban victim at the start of a rural slasher, I went to the countryside as a way to escape. The truth was, I knew nothing about what it meant to be a farmer, to live in rural America. Those months on the farm were some of the loneliest I’ve felt. There is a certain isolation that existed there, a lack of distractions, that forced me to confront a deeper self, someone I may not have known existed.
In Pearl, Pearl is given agency that is not afforded to other killers in rural films. She has intimate desires, longings, dreams. In yearning to escape the countryside, she subverts the stagnant killer and escapist victim binary of horror. Pearl not only faces physical isolation, but also contends with a sense that she is not quite normal, and is thus further isolated from everyone around her. Perhaps she thinks that escaping the farm might let her escape herself.
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In the closing shot of Pearl, she attempts to clean up the murder spree she has committed. She disposes of her sister-in-law’s body in the lake and arranges the bodies of her murdered parents around the kitchen table, as if she is pretending the events of the movie never occured. Her mother, in an attempt to suppress her daughter’s ambitions, always told her to make the best of what she already had. Pearl’s dreams were bigger than that. Like Maxine, she was not willing to accept a life she felt she did not deserve.
Howard, finally home from war, walks into the kitchen. Pearl enters the room, holding a rotten roasted pig covered in maggots. She is smiling and she can’t stop, a big Hollywood smile, shaking and weeping, as the camera closes in on her face.
LOLA SIMON B’24 is looking for someone with X-factor.
