Horror Westerns, Yee Haw!

Horror Westerns, Yee Haw! 🤠

By Kristin Battestella

Pioneer perils are the perfect setting for the weird, morose, scary, and macabre! Here's a trio of contemporary takes on the horror meets western genre fusion – with mixed results.

The Burrowers – Innocent proposals and Dakota Territory picnics open this 2008 parable before hiding in the root cellar, mysterious holes in the ground, and unseen terrors. Inexplicable wounds and a strange lack of blood loss leave neighbors digging multiple graves as squeamish boys must grow up and join the rescue posse. Time is taken to introduce Crow guides, Freedmen, and Irish immigrants, but the us versus them racist dynamics are felt thanks to whips, hangings, torture, and mustache twirling cavalrymen who enjoy it. Titular translations are disbelieved or misinterpreted as convenient and valuable Ute information is ignored despite rustling in the night and disappearing men. Muted, realistic colors match the subdued banter. This is not outright humor a la Tremors, for here darker prejudiced issues and rapacious fears akin to The Searchers can be more deeply addressed. The eyes of the dead are shot out to leave their spirits blind and girls buried alive have scratching sounds coming from inside their bodies as horse injuries and blood splatter make us recoil. The camera is frantic within the action and horrors, however there is time for personal pauses and reflection on the gory moments, toxins, and paralysis. Shootouts, screams in the dark, what you can't see beyond the firelight, and desperate to stay awake delirium mar the increasingly difficult journey. Creatures are afoot but who's a “redskin” friend or foe is more important to white men who killed the buffalo and now deservedly find themselves on the menu. Rather than typical panoramic monster roar reveals, brief crawling glimpses and grass level views build suspense before painful bear traps, decomposing decoys, and a slurping feast. The CGI and effects may be poor today and daylight conveniences make the finale easy, but the body horror disturbing and focus on the horror metaphors over the usual in your face creature feature approach is refreshing. Hatred is more important than a potential monster cure, and the bitter cavalry clean up blaming it all on “injuns” makes for an effective manifest destiny commentary with multi-layered mirror to nature horror.

Promising but Flawed

The Wind – Director Emma Tammi (Into the Dark) opens this 2019 feminine horror western with blood, stillborns, and shallow graves. Eponymous breezes and echoing screams match the string discord and barren landscape. Some pioneers are leaving this bleak, violent territory while others ride for supplies before the harsh winter. Scary wolves, growling, and innate perils break the mundane silence and still isolation. There's prowling at the door and our Mrs. is rushing to reload. The population grows to four when another young couple arrives – a lone flickering light in the darkness between distant cabins where the land plays tricks on you. The changing dynamics and inability to adjust lead to hiding under the bed prayers and fears that something is coming to get you thanks to dead animals, buzzing flies, and repeated knocks at the door with no one there. Symbolic water, rain, and hand washing scenes contrast reading The Mysteries of Udolpho and Frankenstein aloud as the candles blow out and the Bible buried in the grave is somehow back on the doorstep. Our new lady is pregnant and seeing things amid howling, shadows on the curtain, and precious, dwindling matches. Demons of the prairie fiction escalates to hidden diaries, illicit scandals, and unexpected ghosts as warnings not to be out after dark go unheeded. Unfortunately, the silent disjointed scenes are deliberately confusing. Why chop up your story when the tension should stand on its own shocking? Perhaps the cut away scares are meant to create disorientation, but the noticeable movie making weakens all the momentum, losing the surreal purgatory immersion and frazzled state of mind. An out of order narrative still telling something cohesive is fine, but distracting viewers with loud cues between random scene changes cheats us out of being alone with the characters because we're too busy piecing together what we already suspected at the start. Disturbing revelations, black smoke, and evil disguised as the dead descend toward jealousy and madness in excellent, uninterrupted scenes. However, the typical across the floor whooshes and ambiguous ending are frustrating and deceptive, pulling the rug out from under the audience. The frantic performance, brooding scares, and eerie atmosphere are great, but messing with the viewer via cinematic constructs dampens the taut paranoia – which should have been told organically.

You Make The Call

Dead Birds – Confederate soldiers turned bank robbers hide out in a abandoned Alabama mansion in this 2004 tale starring Henry Thomas (E.T.) and Michael Shannon (Take Shelter). Mismatched uniforms, overgrown fields, swamp misdirection, and creepy scarecrows set off the gory slices, dead bodies, shootouts, head shots, and blood splatter. Lanterns, thunderstorms, horses, creepy barns, and noises under the bed begat deformed animals among the cornstalks, skeletons in the slave quarters, and spell books for raising the dead. Pointing fingers over the gold tensions and rattling on the outhouse door frights work when we don't see anything, however creepy kids with typical blacked out eyes, roar mouths, and under the bed jump scares don't advance the slow burn meandering. Laughable women's fashions immediately draw viewers out of the 1863 disturbing, and the isolated build is laborious with multiple redundant shots and repeated lines to listen up and move on without actually doing so. Everything in the first half hour before they arrive at the manor could have been skipped, and ham fisted exposition on how this tenuous gang got together comes amid poor dialogue that's trying to sound Southern ye olde but has the wrong modern rhythm. A chilling old man ghost at the foot of the bed, voodoo dolls, the wounded being nearer to seeing spirits – there are pieces of something special here but the period fears and gold fever resort to contemporary horror by numbers. Contrived connections and disjointed strobe vignettes tell viewers about the sacrificial history rather than showing the characters really experiencing the macabre. The past terrors seem more interesting, and even at ninety minutes, this feels overlong because nothing much happens. Although late night watchable for the Southern Gothic mashups, the scares fall back on the same old same old rather than rely on the unique setting's strengths.

Want More delicious western horrors? Head over to InSession Film for our take on Ravenous and Brimstone!