Warning: This article contains spoilers for X (2022).
Ti West’s X subverts the expectations of the slasher genre in a few key ways. There’s an Argento-like surrealness to the visuals, the porn production storyline addresses the “sex equals death” trope head-on, and for perhaps the first time in the genre’s history, the final girl and the killer are played by the same actor (a mesmerizing Mia Goth).
But the movie does adhere to the main trope of the genre: gruesome murders. After the first half of the film sets up the conflicts between the characters, the gripping second half brings those conflicts to a head in a bloodbath. Some characters get off easier than others; a shotgun blast to the chest is preferable to an alligator bite to the head.
Lorraine
With the triple whammy of Scream, Studio 666, and X, Jenna Ortega has quickly joined the canon of iconic “scream queens” alongside Jamie Lee Curtis and Anya Taylor-Joy. In X, she plays Lorraine, a secondary “final girl” archetype who, unfortunately, doesn’t survive to the end credits. She almost breaks free, then gets taken down at the last second.
Against all odds, after being trapped in the basement and having her hand broken while trying to escape, she makes it out and flees to the front door – where she’s promptly gunned down by Howard. Compared to the others, Lorraine’s death was mercifully quick.
Howard
Howard’s death isn’t gruesome at all, because he isn’t killed by a murder weapon; he’s killed by his own heart. While he and Pearl are disposing of Lorraine’s body, she sparks back to life for a second and the shock of it is too much for Howard’s already-established weak heart.
There’s no blood or gore in this death scene, but an elongated heart attack is still a nasty way to go. At least Howard gets to die in the arms of his loving wife.
Jackson
Throughout the movie, Jackson does everything that characters who die in slasher films do: sex with multiple partners, regular marijuana use, voluntarily going to a dark, isolated spot. Like Lorraine, Jackson is killed quickly by a shotgun blast – but Jackson’s shotgun blast is from a much closer range, and since his body flew into the pond, the gator likely got him afterward. As a fellow Marine, Jackson agrees to help Howard look for his missing wife.
After they search the perimeter of the pond, Howard uses his flashlight to draw Jackson into the water, then has to improvise when the gator doesn’t bite. Jackson comes out of the pond to find a shotgun barrel pointed at his chest.
RJ
After his girlfriend requests a role in the movie and has sex with Jackson on camera, writer-director RJ goes into a jealous spiral and decides to take Wayne’s van and abandon the production. But before he can leave, Pearl – seemingly frightened and vulnerable – stands in his headlights.
When RJ goes over to try to help her, she suddenly jams a knife into his neck. As he bleeds out, Pearl stabs RJ so many times that his blood coats the headlights and changes the lighting of the scene to an Argento-adjacent red-tinged glow. To make the moment even more disturbing, after re-lighting the scene with RJ’s blood, Pearl breaks into one of her old dances over his lifeless corpse.
Wayne
Wayne Gilroy is the producer holding everything together. He recruited the cast and crew, he rented the farmhouse (which would turn out to be a huge mistake), and he allowed a budding auteur to follow his vision of the first truly cinematic adult film.
He gets killed while he’s looking for that auteur in the barn. Wayne peeks through a hole in the wall, trying to make out a figure in the distance, before learning very abruptly that he should’ve been worried about a much closer figure as a nail is jammed through the hole and into his eye. Wayne eventually dies from the horrific stab wound (confirmed by Pearl poking him with a rake), but it takes a really long time.
Pearl
Mia Goth gives a riveting dual performance in X as both the final girl and the killer. As the hero and villain, Goth’s characters are diametrically opposed: one is a young self-proclaimed “sex symbol,” while the other is in her twilight years (and dangerously repressed). At the movie’s climax, Pearl tries to shoot Maxine with Howard’s shotgun, but the blast sends her flying out onto the porch with a broken hip.
Unable to move, Pearl begs for mercy as Maxine gets in the truck, starts the engine, and relentlessly runs over Pearl’s head. It’s fitting that Pearl should be dealt one of the grimmest deaths in the movie, since she’s the one who started it.
Bobby-Lynne
The “Chekhov’s alligator” in X is a great example of the plant-and-payoff screenwriting technique. There’s a darkly comedic tension when the alligator is introduced, slowly advancing on an oblivious Maxine as she gradually makes her way back to the boardwalk. In that sequence, she narrowly avoids the alligator’s bite – but West doesn’t deprive the audience of alligator action.
Like a classic “Chekhov’s gun,” the alligator returns in the final act to really “go off.” When Pearl is wrestling with Bobby-Lynne on the boardwalk, the audience knows that one of them is going to be eaten. Sadly, it’s not Pearl who takes a dive and meets an undesirable fate; it’s Bobby-Lynne. The alligator eats her in the most horrific way imaginable, lunging out of the water and clamping its teeth down on her skull.