Director Ti West on the locations of X, his grungy homage to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Sometimes one location is enough, or so indie horror vet Ti West proves again and again. He did this most famously with 2009's The House of the Devil, a babysitter-meets-Satanists meltdown that was barely contained within the walls of its creaky old mansion. West's latest, the A24-distributed X, is set in 1979 and, with uncanny precision, the same sweltering, ominous atmosphere of Tobe Hooper's 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (another scrappy film that makes a lot from a little).

"We were trying to get Texas right," West says, even as his production shifted hemispheres to beat the pandemic. They ended up in Whanganui, North Island, New Zealand. "And then we found this house, and it was like, whoa. The exterior, we just lucked out." Were the Kiwi owners cannibals? "I'm pretty sure they had just watched Emma. They were like, 'Oh, Mia Goth's great!' "

X's Goth, Scott Mescudi (a.k.a. Kid Cudi) and their gang — a collection of porn performers and one painfully pretentious cinematographer — pile into a van and head out of Houston to make their own Debbie Does Dallas. About his film's wheels, West says, "We were looking for a van that we could carpet. And weirdly, I was like, 'We can't make it green because that's too Chain Saw.'" Finding left-side steering in New Zealand could've been tricky, but by "some miracle," a dude appeared with a cargo van they could gut and repaint. "I'd like to think he's still driving it around."

West and crew built X's bunkhouse and its oppressive den from scratch on an adjacent field right next to their instantly iconic house. "We didn't want it to be gross, necessarily," the filmmaker says. "It was meant to be a place that was just dusty and hadn't been used in a while." Props he imported included '70s-era cans of Pearl beer, an authentic Texarkana brew.

You won't see any human taxidermy on the walls ("too on-the-nose," West says), but an animal-skin rug is prominent. "It's kind of your stock- issue cowhide rug, now very boho-chic. If you grew up around beef farming and slaughterhouses and whatnot, it would be a very common accouterment. I find it quite cozy."

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