X ★★★½
(R) 106 minutes

Much as Freddy, Jason, Leatherface and the rest keep returning from beyond the grave, certain critical cliches about slasher movies refuse to die.

One such cliche is that the victims in these movies are slaughtered as punishment for having sex, and that the Final Girl who defeats the killer is inevitably the one character who has stayed pure.

In truth, this convention was never set in stone. But since the 1990s, many makers of slashers have latched onto the idea and set out to subvert expectations, as writer-director Ti West (The Innkeepers) does in X, a welcome comeback for his thoughtful yet visceral brand of retro horror.

Like West’s previous horror films, X sets itself the challenge of being both a back-to-basics scare mechanism and a commentary on how that mechanism functions.

Specifically, we’re asked to ponder the relationship between horror and porn, two disreputable genres that flourished in 1970s America. Are they, in some sense, two aspects of the one phenomenon?

To flesh this out, so to speak, West introduces us to the cast and crew of The Farmer’s Daughter, an independent, low-budget porno conceived in 1979 for the new home video market.

For the main location, the good-ol’-boy producer Wayne (Martin Henderson) has rented a guesthouse on the property of a surly, elderly farmer (Stephen Ure).

Even if you’ve never seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you may already be getting a rough idea of how things are likely to go down.