Pearl director Ti West set out to make a Disney version of a horror movie
From the moment the first trailer for Pearl arrived, tacked on to the end ofTi West’s stylish A24 horror movie X, it was obvious that the film was a satire of a broad section of Hollywood history. Tyler Bates and Tim Williams’ comically swoony score, the retro title treatments, and even the emphatic, exaggerated performances all conjure up images of canonized movies, from the 1930s classics The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind to 1950s melodramas like Douglas Sirk’sImitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows.
But in an interview ahead of Pearl’s release, West told Polygon that there was another, less immediately obvious touchstone for Pearl’s visual style and story tone: classic Disney movies.
“I just felt like Pearl has this sort of naiveté that matches a Disney movie, except it’s much darker and more demented,” West says. “That became an interesting jumping-off point.”
All three movies in the Xtrilogy — X, the prequel Pearl, and the newly announced sequel MaXXXine — are pastiches of Hollywood classics. X is set in the 1970s and draws visually and narratively from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its followers. MaXXXine, West revealed after Pearl’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, will be set in the 1980s and inspired by the ’80s VHS boom, as the grainy look and tracking lines on the first teaser trailer suggest.
Pearl, by contrast, is meant to evoke Disney’s early era and the age of classical musicals, although it isn’t a musical itself. But West says he and his team didn’t look to any one particular movie or era for visual inspiration, the way they did with X.
“It’s more general,” he says. “There may have been some specific movies I looked at with Eliot Rockett, the DP, or Tom [Hammock], the
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