Ti West’s Favorite Films: 10 Movies the Director Wants You to Watch

Ryan Lattanzio
·2-min read

Ti West has been churning out grisly indie horror films for almost two decades, starting with “The Roost” before his breakout satanic panic thriller “The House of the Devil” in 2009. But his recent collaboration with A24 on porn-set slasher “X,” campy gothic follow-up “Pearl,” and trilogy-ender “MaXXXine” has spawned an entirely singular Ti West Cinematic Universe: a cause for celebration in a Hollywood, where such franchises too often seem to cannibalize each other with spinning-out-of-control mythologies and winking and self-referential fan-baiting.

So it’s interesting that, for the director of movies like “Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever” and the Jonestown-inspired mockumentary “The Sacrament,” the great films of horror history annals largely don’t strike him as the best the medium has to offer. At least, that’s according to his ballot for BFI’s 2022 Sight & Sound filmmakers poll of the greatest movies of all time. There’s no “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or “Halloween” here, but instead a sampling of the Undisputed Greatest American Movies: “Citizen Kane,” “The Godfather,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Psycho” (makes sense), “Sunset Blvd.,” and more.

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In other words, it’s a medley of the Western canon that, at world’s end, humankind would be wise to bottle up and send out into space to aliens to give them an idea of what American movies are. When the list originally dropped, there was some controversy on social media over its supposed generic-ness, the equivalent of a dorm room movie poster hall of fame. But why? It’s a perfectly fine list that speaks to the director’s tastes, which are, for the most part, mainstream and distinctly American. “Pearl,” for one, mines a very specific slice of “Wizard of Oz”-meets-Norma-Desmond movie Americana that can be traced back to these very films.

West is after all in the good graces of a director of one movie on this list (“Taxi Driver”) thanks to Martin Scorsese’s recent praise of “Pearl”: “Ti West’s movies have a kind of energy that is so rare these days, powered by a pure, undiluted love for cinema. You feel it in every frame… ‘Pearl’ makes for a wild, mesmerizing, deeply — and I mean deeply — disturbing 102 minutes. West and his muse and creative partner Mia Goth really know how to toy with their audience… before they plunge the knife into our chests and start twisting. I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn’t stop watching.”

There’s no better imprimatur. Below, the 10 movies West deems the greatest of all time.

[Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2023 with the results of West’s 2022 Sight & Sound Poll. It will be updated over time.]

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