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Ti West shot in February and March 2021 on New Zealand’s North Island, building a large barn on a farm at Fordell and using nearby Whanganui. Producer Peter Phok says the country was chosen for somewhere that could pass for rural Texas in the late seventies. It was shot digitally, then built to feel like a lost old picture. Weta Workshop made up the elderly couple; in some scenes Mia Goth wore thirty separate prosthetic pieces, arms included. Art director Stephen Crowe says West asked them to think in creature design terms, not character design. That explains the film: scenes asking pity for Pearl work against her own makeup. Goth plays both the young performer Maxine and the old Pearl, loading the envy of youth onto one body. The moment shooting finished, a second film was made in secret on the same sets. West wrote Pearl with Goth during this production, and it surfaced only at the SXSW premiere in March 2022. He puts it down to leaving quarantine into the one place where filming was safe, the sets already standing. A good fit if you accept the first stretch going to the film within the film rather than to killing. Not for anyone troubled by old age used as dread; most of the horror loads onto the aged body.