 | |
| Fordell | |
| Category: | Town |
| Continent: | North America |
| Country: | United States of America |
| State: | Texas |
| Residents: | Howard Douglas; Pearl Douglas; Mitsy |
| Continuity: | X film series |
| 1st appearance: | X |
Fordell is a fictional location featured in the X film series. It first appeared as an unnamed town in the 2022 feature film X wherein it represented the primary setting for the film. It was also featured in the prequel film Pearl released that same year. Both films presented this setting at different time periods with X taking place in 1979 and Pearl taking place in 1918.
History[]
Fordell is a rural farmland community located in East Texas. In 1918, many of the locales were affected by the influenza "Purple Death" pandemic, which claimed the lives of 675,000 people in the United States and more than 21 million people worldwide. During this time, many of the country's young men were off fighting in Europe in the Great War, leaving many housewives and daughters at home to care for themselves.
One of these young men was Howard Douglas who was over in Europe fighting in the trenches while his young wife Pearl stayed at her family's farm, living an unfulfilled life. Pearl was desperate to get away, but the needs of her German mother and invalid father prevented her from pursuing a life of stardom. Additionally, Pearl suffered from severe mental illness, which affected her socially. Pearl was responsible for several deaths in Fordell, including the accidental death of her mother, whose dress caught on fire as the two struggled with one another. She also euthanized her ailing father by suffocating him to death. When a film projectionist and one-time lover rejected Pearl after suspecting her to be mentally ill, she reacted by stabbing him in the chest with a pitchfork and then stabbing him a second time through the mouth. Her next victim was her sister-in-law Mitsy. Although jealous of Mitsy's wealth and newfound opportunity as a follies dancer, Pearl killed her more out of a sense of preservation after confessing her sins to her. She hacked her up with an axe then fed the pieces to a large alligator in a nearby lake named Theda.
Howard returned from the war that year, but Pearl and he never left Fordell. Accepting a life she felt she didn't deserve, the two remained on the farm for the remainder of their days.
In 1979, a group of pornographers rented out a guest house on the Douglas farm. Howard handled the negotiations, careful to keep Pearl inside as best he could and away from the new guests. He didn't approve film producer Wayne Gilroy or his employees, and felt that their presence at the farm might "entice" his wife. Well into her eighties, Pearl was insanely jealous of the youth and vitality of the new guests. Desperate for any form of intimacy, she became obsessed with watching them; in particular a pornographic actress named Maxine Minx. When she could not satisfy her desires through intimacy, she instead turned to violence. She murdered film director R.J. Nichols by stabbing him repeatedly in the throat with a knife. She killed Wayne Gilroy by poking his eyes out with a pitchfork. She killed Bobby-Lynne Parker by pushing her off the lakeside dock, feeding her to the alligator that lived there. Howard Douglas was no stranger to violence either, though his actions were aimed more at some misplaced notion of protecting his wife. He killed Vietnam veteran Jackson Hole with a shotgun to the chest, then later blew off half of Lorraine Day's face with the same shotgun. Lorraine's death rattle startled Howard to the point that he had a heart attack and died. The final would-be victim was Maxine Minx, who narrowly avoided a fatal shotgun blast when Pearl picked up her husband's weapon. The blast was too much for the frail old woman however and blew her backwards through the front door and onto the ground, breaking her hip. Maxine ran past her and got into the Douglas' truck. She then ran Pearl's head over, killing her, thus ending her decades-long murder spree.
Residents of Fordell[]
Notes[]
- Although the film version of Fordell is fictionalized, a real city called Fordell is located in New Zealand. The actual Fordell is where both X and Pearl are filmed.
- Neither of the films in which Fordell appears addresses the location by name. It is the third film in the series MaXXXine, which does not take place in Fordell, but it does contain a newspaper clipping of the events from X in which it identifies Fordell as the location.
Related categories[]
See also[]
 This template will categorize articles that include it in into the X miscellaneous category. |