Director Ti West went over the rainbow to make 'demented, disturbing' horror prequel Pearl

Scratch a horror director and you'll often find a raging film fan, steeped in the on-screen history of scares. But in the case of industrious filmmaker Ti West, 41, the movie love goes deeper than most.

In director West's new horror prequel Pearl (out Sept. 16), Mia Goth portrays the title role of a woman living on a remote farmhouse who mentally unravels with extremely violent consequences. Although Pearl is set in 1918, during both World War I and a devastating flu epidemic, West's colorful, lushly photographed tale invokes the style of many movies made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as 1939's The Wizard of Oz and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk.

This is not the first time West has tapped into an earlier cinematic era. His breakthrough movie, 2009's The House of the Devil, paid homage to '80s babysitter horror, while this year's acclaimed, '70s-set X, in which Goth portrayed both an uncredited older version of Pearl (in full-body makeup) and a young porn actress named Maxine, nodded stylistically to many films of that decade, notably Tobe Hooper's infamous 1974 shocker The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. West shot X and Pearl back-to-back in New Zealand but for the latter film, he made use of tropes and techniques that are mostly far removed from the horror genre, even as the director set about relating a story with no shortage of terror and mayhem.

Christopher Moss/A24 Mia Goth in Pearl

"That contrast was always really interesting," says West, who co-scripted the film with Goth. "While we were doing it, it felt original, for lack of a better term — the evocativeness of some of the demented imagery mixed in with the colors and everything. It is a movie takes a little while before you realize it's a horror movie. But by the end, there certainly are some some disturbing and demented moments."

West explains that he was less interested in tipping his hat to specific films from the '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s than he was in channeling and repurposing the period's general cinematic tone and look.

"I could go on about Douglas Sirk movies, I could go on about all sorts of movies, but it was never [about] one movie in particular," says the director. "There are moments that remind you of Wizard of Oz, and there are moments that remind you of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, but for the most part it was more just like: We're committing to this aesthetic. Any research with movies was less for scenes and more for: Let's look at The Red Shoes and what the actual saturation of red looks like, and things like that. So it becomes this exhaustingly esoteric venture."

How exhausting? "You would look at the wall in our office and there'd be all these swatches of red paint for the barn and they'd all look exactly the same," West continues. "It's like that scene in American Psycho when they're looking at the business cards. You'd be like, 'Ah, that one's a little too red-orange.' But it was an effort to find the right reds, the right blues, and the right primary colors compared to the other stuff in the frame to really make it feel like a movie from a different era, rather than just feeling colorful."

Christopher Moss/A24 Mia Goth in Pearl

West also took care to make sure that the hairstyles and makeup sported by the cast appropriately evoked the Technicolor era.

"We went a bit over the top with some of the makeup," he says. "You wouldn't think that, because the movie teaches you how to watch it more or less from the first shot, so you're kind of prepared for it. The opening of the movie, I think, teaches you how to watch the movie and sells you the milieu of the movie from the beginning, and you're prepared for these sort of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang choices. But if you just dropped into a random scene, the hair and wardrobe and makeup [would look] bonkers."

Dominique Charriau/WireImage Pearl director Ti West

Pearl had its world premiere at the recent Venice Film Festival and, like X, was well-received by critics. On Tuesday night, West revealed at the film's Toronto International Film Festival screening that he and Goth will collaborate on a third film set in the X universe, this one inspired by the video boom of the '80s, and titled MaXXXine. The director says he wishes he could have filmed all three movies back-to-back.

"If I'd had the forethought ahead of time, and could have written three in a row, we probably would have done it," he explains. "Unfortunately, I'm a bit of a slacker and I could only come up with two."

The cast of Pearl also includes David Corenswet, Tandi Wright, Matthew Sunderland, and Emma Jenkins-Purro. A24 releases the film in theaters Sept. 16.

Watch the trailer for Pearl below.

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