Double Feature: X & Wild Things

It’s miserably hot. It’s unbearably humid. Everyone is sweaty and peeling themselves off vinyl seats. So naturally, the latest installment of my Double Feature series pairs two movies where the characters are just as miserable-looking as the rest of us: John McNaughton’s Wild Things (1998) and Ti West’s X (2022).

They may seem like strange bedfellows—a twisty ’90s South Florida erotic thriller and a 1970s-set Texas exploitation slasher—but both are sun-baked, sex-soaked films fascinated by desire, class, ambition, and performative sex acts. More importantly, both draw on genres built around displaying women’s bodies, invite us to participate in that gaze, and then complicate what we think we know about the women we’re watching.

In the newest Double Feature at The Limen, I dig into what connects Wild Things and X: oppressive Southern heat, dangerous bodies of water, the slippery relationship between sex and power, and the difference between being looked at and being understood.

Read the full pairing—and find out why these two belong on the same sweaty summer bill—at The Limen on Substack.