Ti West's slasher horror homage X featured many gruesome kills, and the upcoming prequel Pearl promises a callback to one of X's kills while making it even more brutal. X paid homage to classic horror movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Eaten Alive, and Pearl looks to be an homage to vibrant technicolor old Hollywood movies with a gory twist. Pearl was initially teased after the credits of certain theatrical shows of X, and it is the second film in a proposed X trilogy.
Pearl will explore the dark origin story of the titular character and main antagonist of X played by Mia Goth in dual roles before she was the adult filmmaker-slaying killer of the first movie. While Pearl takes place in 1918 during WWI and takes stylistic inspiration from colorful melodramas, it still promises to be shockingly lurid and gory. Pearl's backstory is filled with mutilations, exploding bodies, and stabbed farm animals, even taking inspiration from X by including Pearl's interest in becoming an adult film star.
One of the most brutal kills from X features Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) suddenly being eaten by an alligator, and the Pearl trailer teases a similar kill in which Pearl pushes her wheelchair-bound father to the end of the dock to meet the same fate. This kill was hinted at in X, with Pearl's father's wheelchair visible in her and Howard's (Stephen Ure) basement. This variation on the violent X kill is even more brutal because of its maliciousness. In X Pearl takes advantage of the fact that Bobby-Lynne happened to find her on the dock, but in Pearl, Pearl seems to have planned this murder, knowing that her invalid father would not be able to run or swim away from the impending danger.
Pearl Is Proving To Be Just As Gory As X
Pearl did most of the killing in X, and she was appropriately calculated about it because of her age. She needed to sneak around and kill quietly because any of the young filmmakers could have easily outfought her. But it is revealed in the Pearl trailer that she has always been the conniving killer that was seen in X. The new alligator kill in Pearl is also more brutal compared to Bobby-Lynne's death X because Pearl is killing someone close to her, suggesting that there will be heavy familial strife that leads her to kill her father.
The style of Ti West's Pearl looks completely different from X, choosing to show its horrors in the light of day with vibrant colors, the brutality and shocking death scenes featured in X will not be tamed in this prequel. With the twisted mirroring of Bobby-Lynne's death scene in X, Pearl looks to be a perfect companion piece to the original movie while taking on a life of its own. Pearl will tackle more personal horrors than X, showing what went wrong in Pearl's life that made her into the killer seen in X, and it's shaping up to be a gory blast from the past.