“Wanna hear a story… city boy?”: The Ten Best Horror Westerns

At the crossroads of two classic genres.

3. “High Plains Drifter” (1973)
Directed by Clint Eastwood

“When we get done, this place is going to look like hell.” Clint Eastwood’s second directorial effort is a grim, gothic western that drops the stark imagery and mercenary characters of his Sergio Leone work into a revenge tale with quasi-supernatural echoes. “Damn you to hell,” curses a town marshal as he’s lashed to death by grinning killers while the townsfolk stand transfixed, less in horror than sour distaste. Along comes Eastwood, another man with no name, but this stranger is less wandering gunman than Old Testament Angel of Vengeance summoned by the dying man, or perhaps a restless spirit who dreams of death (his own?) in his fitful sleep. He’s not picky about who gets caught in the crossfire when he brings pitiless poetic justice to a venal town.

The monsters here are decidedly human and any supernatural dimension is a veiled suggestion at best, but the fiery retribution has a certain Biblical resonance to it — and it brings a whole new dimension to the phrase “paint the town red.” 1971’s “The Beguiled” and 1985’s “Pale Rider,” which Eastwood also directed and starred in, belong to the same strain of quasi-horror westerns.

2. “Vampires” (1998)

Directed by John Carpenter

John Carpenter transforms a vampire story into a perverse remake of Howard Hawks’ “Rio Bravo” by way of Sergio Leone and “The Wild Bunch.” James Woods is Carpenter’s foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, whore-mongering answer to John Wayne, and his posse is a grimy pack of vampire-hunting professionals. With its blood red skies, dusky, dusty landscapes, a Ry Cooder-ish bluesy score and ferocious bloodsuckers that are at once feral animals and imposing aristocrats of the underworld, this lean Southern Gothic genre bash marries the western and the vampire film with earthy style. The sleek, stark images and stripped down, no-holds-barred action make for pure pulp glory, and there’s a perverse comic book irony in such unrepentant misogynist macho warriors serving as emissaries of the Vatican, with Woods gleefully leading the pack as the choir boy gone bad. Call it a guilty pleasure if you will, but the pleasures are visceral, a movie that sinks its teeth into both genres and takes a big meaty bite out of them.

1. “Near Dark” (1987)

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

To reduce Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark” to the phrase “vampire western” is to miss the poetry and the power of her uniquely American reworking of the classically European horror genre. Beautiful blue-eyed farm boy Adrian Pasdar succumbs to the little girl lost charms of honey-voiced Jenny Wright, the doe-eyed junior member of a scruffy pack of human predators that hunts the backroads by night. They’re family in every meaningful sense: Lance Henriksen’s scarred survivor is a kind of dad, Jenette Goldstein’s soiled peroxide blonde lapses into mothering instincts and Bill Paxton is the wild man big brother.

Bigelow suggests both the frontier community romanticism of a John Ford western and the violent ferocity of a Sam Peckinpah film without denying the animal savagery of their predatory nature. The night scenes have a stiletto crispness to them, as if seen through the heightened senses of the nocturnal hunters, and the days have a foggy haze of innocence lost. But finally, “Near Dark” is about family and blood in the most primal sense: the blood that feeds, the blood that binds, and in this new chapter of vampire lore, the blood that heals.

[Additional photos: "Curse of the Undead," Universal, 1959; "Westworld," Warner Bros., 1973; "Grim Prairie Tales: Hit the Trail to...Terror," East-West Film Partners, 1990; "Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning," Lions Gate Films, 2004; "From Dusk Till Dawn," Dimension Films, 1996; "Ravenous," 20th Century Fox, 1999; "Vampires," Columbia Pictures, 1998; "Near Dark," De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1987]

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