First thing you gotta know about showbiz is how tough it can be. No matter how starry-eyed your dreams of fame and fortune make you, it’s best to remember that you may not be cut out for it — and if you’re in a showbiz horror movie, you may be cut out of it literally. Ti West’s MaXXXine, the concluding chapter in his trilogy looking at the slasher genre’s relationship with 20th-century entertainment, makes good on Pearl ’s promise to be recognized as a star; expect Tinseltown, Hollywood legacies, and a medically inadvisable amount of seediness.
But it’s by no means the first film to recognize the veneer of celebrity as fertile ground for salacious, disturbing narratives. Horror films set in Hollywood, critiquing its fanatic appeal or implicating everyone complicit in its ongoing abuse and exploitation, have been around for decades. The best possible outcome for dreams of stardom is fame, fortune, and a fantastic legacy, while the worst possible outcome is some variation on surreal, ambition-related psychosis, being butchered in shadowy production lots, and the meticulous craft of making a movie being ironically mirrored in a murderer’s modus operandi.
Tons of horror films argue that Hollywood’s dream is killing us; the promise of glitz and glamour actively encourages desperate people to render themselves vulnerable to horror’s malign grip. All that grim stuff aside, most horror movies about showbiz are also funny! The cartoonishness of the industry’s fac.
