‘Axe’: The obscure low-budget horror movie that inspired Ti West’s ‘Pearl’
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(Credit: Press)
The release of Ti West’s X marked the start of a trilogy which made Mia Goth a modern-day scream queen.
As Maxine, she played the budding actor who embarks on a pornographic career to get one step closer to her dreams of stardom. Yet, during X, we see her come head-to-head with an unlikely villain –an elderly woman named Pearl, played by Goth in prosthetics.
Thus, for the second instalment in the trilogy, Pearl, West centred on the antagonist’s backstory, which explored her killer origins. The movie soon went viral, with people dressing up as the character and reciting her intense monologues online. Clearly, the unhinged character, whose emotionally damaged upbringing and isolation spurs her to kill, resonated (albeit on a much less murderous level) with many viewers. Ignoring her unspeakable crimes, Pearl represents a young woman whose unfulfilled dreams and desires incite deep emotion within her, which is something that many people can surely relate to.
The trilogy was admired by many for its obvious homages to retro horror, with X significantly drawing from movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho, while Pearl looked more at the Technicolor world of movies like The Wizard of Oz, representing the shiny land of cinematic dreams that the character so desperately wants to be a part of.
Yet, there’s one film that few people seem to mention, but the parallels between certain shots from Pearl and a low-budget horror film from 1974 are too similar to be mere coincidence. There is no way that West hasn’t seen Lisa, Lisa, otherwise known as Axe or The California Axe Massacre (can you tell it was released the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre?).
The film, directed by first-time filmmaker Frederick R Freidel, takes us to a deserted house in the American countryside (although it’s a lot more civilised than Leatherface’s dwellings) where three criminals take refuge away from the police. Having just killed a man, they need to hide out, but they soon come across a teenage girl whose quietness is mistaken for vulnerability. What they don’t know is that she is actually just as capable of killing as they are.
Clocking in at just over an hour and shot on a budget of $25,000, the film isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it has a hazy atmosphere that slowly unravels to the sounds of subtle musical motifs and limited dialogue. It’s perfectly unnerving, with Lisa harnessing a level of coldness that is far more terrifying than the lousy criminals who try to disturb her peace.
While the plots aren’t exactly the same by any means, Pearl borrows many aesthetic cues from Lisa, Lisa, such as identical shots of the characters wielding their axes from a low-down angle, forcing us to look up at them as though we’re the victim. Even the shots of Lisa wheeling her disabled grandfather are reflected in shots of Pearl wheeling her father, while both characters stand in the window, the camera ominously panning towards them, as well as Pearl and Lisa finding a sick joy in playing with eggs.
You can see the influence of Lisa, Lisa in the scuffles Pearl has with various male characters, and even the houses in each film look similar. For a horror aficionado like West, it would be unlikely that these were mere coincidences. It seems as though he was paying homage to an obscure ‘70s indie horror that revels in schlocky violence and a surprisingly ruthless murderer.
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