A24’s 'MaXXXine' Is Full of Horror Movie Easter Eggs
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For MaXXXine, the final blood-soaked film in Ti West’s X trilogy, the writer/director traded the rural Texas farm town from the previous two films for the glitzy—and seedy—streets of Hollywood.
Set in 1985, Mia Goth returns as Maxine Minx, an ex-porn actress who dreams of becoming a real movie star. And she finally lands her big break in a horror movie sequel titled The Puritan 2 (in one scene, she falls asleep watching the first one with her friend Leon, played by Moses Sumney). The next thing she knows, she’s on set at the Universal Studios lot with the movie’s serious, and very chic, director Elizabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki).
Maxine has come a long way since X, where she and a group of adult film actors attempt to make a movie inside the guest house on an elderly couple’s farm. But things take a dark turn when the couple Howard and Pearl (also played by Goth) end up killing them all, leaving Maxine as the only survivor and ultimate Final Girl.
Below, we rounded up all the horror Easter eggs and references from MaXXXine—which include Psycho, Halloween, and more. And as Bette Davis says in the opening quote of the movie, “In this business, until you’re known as a monster, you’re not a star.”
Psycho
After Maxine finally lands a role in a horror movie sequel titled The Puritan 2, its director Elizabeth takes her on a tour of the Universal Studios lot where they’ll be shooting. Maxine hitches a ride on Elizabeth’s golf cart and she drives her to the set where Psycho was filmed (we even see a sign that reads “Bates Motel”). The iconic 1960 movie, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, a secretary who gets caught in a heavy rainstorm and decides to stay the night at the shady Bates Motel. There, she meets the hotel’s very creepy proprietor Norman Bates. The Psycho set also returns later on in the film, when Maxine hides inside its fake interior after being chased by a seedy private investigator (Kevin Bacon).
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Halloween
“Name some actors who got their start in horror movies,” Maxine asks of her friend Leon after she lands the role. He then rattles off a list of names, “Jamie Lee Curtis, Brooke Shields, John Travolta...” Indeed, Curtis followed in her mom Janet Leigh’s footsteps when she made her feature film debut in the 1978 film Halloween, which has spawned over 10 sequels to date. The movie takes place on—you guessed it—Halloween night in a quaint, suburban town in Illinois when the cold-blooded killer Michael Myers seeks out his next victims.
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Alice, Sweet Alice
Brooke Shields, on the other hand, made her film debut in the 1976 horror movie Alice, Sweet Alice. Shields plays Karen Spages, a young girl who gets brutally murdered on the day of her first Communion. The killer, who donned a Halloween mask and yellow raincoat at the time of the attack, is suspected to be her older sister Alice. The girl’s aunt then dies shortly after, which prompts the family priest and their father to intervene and search for the true killer.
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
If you watched the first X movie, you remember the brutal murders of all the adult film actors (some of which included Kid Cudi, who also serves as an executive producer of the trilogy, and Brittany Snow). In MaXXXine, the killings are referred to in a newspaper clipping as “the Texas porn star massacre,” a direct reference to the 1974 horror The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The movie takes place on (where else?) a farm when two siblings venture to their family’s old farmhouse only to discover a chainsaw-wielding murderer named Leatherface, who wears a mask made of human skin.
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A Fool There Was
One night, when Maxine is walking down the streets of Hollywood Boulevard with her friend Tabby (Halsey), she steps on a nondescript star on the Walk of Fame. When the camera zooms in closer, we see that it belongs to Theda Bara, a silent film actress who is widely regarded as one of Hollywood’s first sex symbols. (Pearl’s pet alligator from the previous film also shares a name with the actress). In 1915, Bara starred in A Fool There Was where she played a character called “The Vampire,” which was one of the earliest mentions of the term onscreen.
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