Editorials
Painting Faces: The ‘X’ Trilogy and Its Reverence for Makeup
The X trilogy is ever a love letter to cinema. Though the first installment is built around a cluster of young people making pornography, it still highlights its love to the craft of filmmaking by having characters directly refer to the art and also by being set in the late-70s and dressed up in that era’s horror aesthetic. While various crafts are highlighted, the series makes a lot of room for the art of painting faces for a collection of effects. With MaXXXine, the third installment in the Ti West and Mia Goth franchise, now gracing the silver screen, the love for classic eras of cinema is ever palpable. Within that is the love for all things cinema makeup, beauty and FX.
X was perhaps unassuming when it snuck up on 2022 audiences with its distinct 70s look. It didn’t at all lack period appropriate hairstyles and eyewear. Though Bobby-Lynn (Brittany Snow) is built as the standout bombshell, it’s Maxine (Mia Goth) who steals the styled spotlight, us first seeing her under the lights of a vanity mirror. The denim clad farm girl is almost never without her signature powder blue eyelids, even as she takes a solo dip in a dangerous pond. And where the beauty makeup stops, Maxine’s freckles begin, meant to be real though applied meticulously to Goth before the actress stepped in front of the camera.
Speaking to Bloody Disgusting in 2022, trilogy hair and makeup department head, Sarah Rubano discussed the process of creating the looks with the detail-oriented director. “Maxine and her freckles and her eyeshadow […] I just worked with Ti back and forth. He said, ‘Listen, I want to make them beautifully colorful. I want you to lean into the aesthetic here.’”
It’s the beauty makeup that distinguishes the double-triple-quadruple franchise roles of chameleon, Goth. But then there’s the aged Pearl hiding in plain sight. At the time of the first film in the series, there’s almost no reason to suspect that the creepy old lady at the farmhouse is anyone but an actress with thinning hair. But it’s Goth in yet another costume. Setting up what would end up being Goth led follow ups, the film used makeup to keep her in plain sight and lay the foundation of connection that would hold the series together. Where X could have started and stopped at 70s hair and gore FX, it leaned further into its reverence for the art of filmmaking by allowing different types of makeup to shine. Framed by the velvety lyrics of “Landslide,” Pearl is seen touching her own aged skin surrounded by vintage makeup packaging. Shortly thereafter, a youthful Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) is seen getting painted up for her turn in front of the camera.
Returning quickly as a younger Pearl, Goth comes back into frame in the second feature with a completely different look. With makeup (and perhaps color grading), Goth’s skin is warmer and deeper, the freckles washed away, and her face dressed in darkened lashes and a hot lip. Pearl is fresh faced with pops of color, and one of her big moments has her stained with running mascara. (Though it has ancient origins, the products that propelled Maybelline and Rimmel in the 1910s were early versions of mascara made from petroleum jelly and charcoal. They were messy).
Pearl is a completely different sort of movie, shedding the aesthetic of a 70s slasher for a sparkly classic Hollywood look with plot elements evocative of The Wizard of Oz. Pearl is in technicolor, dropping the muted blues and cool-toned freckles for pinky cheeks and opaque lip color. Goth’s reappearance is buoyed not just by her acting ability, but by Rubano and company’s artful work to give her a completely different look, thereby distinguishing the characters.
Wrapping the trilogy comes MaXXXine which brings back Goth in her original role as Maxine, this time as an 80s broad looking to paint over the version of herself she left at the bloody farmhouse. As Hollywood Maxine, she is arguably someone completely new, having committed more fully to her ruthless nature and being adorned with bleached hair that she lets set into natural waves. The signature blue shadow is gone, her face now painted with a less hastily applied gun metal eye. But her looks don’t start and stop here. Where all three installments in the franchise are about a love for film, leaning on meta-elements, MaXXXine further highlights the spectacle by having Maxine prepare for a studio picture that echoes her reality with a fundamentalist reaction to satanism. Goth, who prepared for X by sitting for a life cast to be made into Pearl, is seen as Maxine sitting for a life cast to prepare for her movie role in The Puritan II. And it pays off, not just in-world but for more meta gags. “Real” heads roll, and a “fake” head is in the center of the feature’s closing shot, Maxine having gazed upon it in awe.
When we’re first introduced to her in X, Maxine is sitting at a makeup mirror. In MaXXXine, she’s seen applying her makeup similarly before her adult film shoot, and later with an airbrush to splash on a beauty look that ends up functioning as war paint. Makeup is treated with a reverence beyond just creating signature looks, but also by reveling in the technique to create character, beauty, and horror, all which hold the real movie and the in-world one together.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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