As her awesome surname might suggest, Mia Goth is turning out to be a bit of a modern day scream queen, making us wince in arty, traumatic scenes from High Life and Suspiria. She made a fabulous final girl in Ti West’s X, one of last year’s most enjoyably messed-up horror movies, and she didn’t even settle for just one scary role.
If you haven’t seen X yet, please go check out the 1970s porno slasher now, and then get excited for the upcoming prequel horror Pearl, which West and Goth quickly put together while X was still being made. Pearl slashes into Australian cinemas on March 16, giving us the early gore and glory of X‘s wizened villainess.
In X, Goth played both a rising adult film star and the wrinkled, self-loathing murderer out for her blood. Those prosthetics looked great, but it’s also nice to turn back the clock and see the titular killer when she was desperate for fame and adoration herself.
All Goth’s ambitious farmgirl wants to do is escape her dowdy home, and she’ll use all the alligators, hoes, and powers of seduction at her disposal to do it. “We’re lookin’ for someone with X factor”, a casting director tells Pearl as she steps onto an X on the floor, reminding us one more time of the film that this acts as an “X-traordinary origin story” to.
We can’t say we were really expecting a prequel to X so soon: the movie was pretty great, as our review here covers, but it only came out in 2022. West has in fact claimed that he hopes to make a trilogy of films spinning off from the original groovy gorefest, continuing with this “demented Disney movie” and concluding with another horror set after the events of X.
Goth and West wrote the screenplay together, originally intending to merely flesh out Goth’s dual characters in the film, but it spun off into this nutty looking, Sirk-ian freakout filmed in New Zealand. Looks like Pearl will get what she always wanted: becoming a huge marquee star, even if it’s as a haggard, creepy baddie in a slasher movie series.
