In honor of the premiere of Westworld, we look at 13 of the greatest horror/fantasy/western hybrid movies in film history
HBO’s much-hyped Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy-created series Westworld premiered tonight to almost universal critical acclaim (you can read our glowing preview here), with many calling it the new dark fantasy successor to the cable network’s Game of Thrones; an expensive, violent and erotic bauble that will be your next Sunday night addiction.
The show (whose first season reportedly cost $100 million to produce) is based on the cult 1973 Michael Crichton classic about a period-flavored fantasy theme park populated by robots that, when a glitch causes them to go haywire, kill any human that gets in their way. The scariest android of death is Yul Brenner’s gunslinger, a resident of Westworld, who locks on his average guy prey (played by Richard Benjamin) with intent to fill him full of holes. This revamped, souped-up version deepens the mythology, with a new, much more malevolent gunslinger now played by Ed Harris and the very nature of the Westworld theme park itself operating with a hidden, possibly evil agenda. The first episode is a stunner and offers – among many sanguinary and fantastical treats – another great Anthony Hopkins performance.
Westworld the film and now, this TV show, are part of a long line of fantasy entertainments that riff on the classic American western, a once sacred genre on which the very fabric of the film industry was founded upon (Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 landmark The Great Train Robbery is the first recognized narrative film). The western offers classic tropes of man battling nature, braving untapped terrain, fighting themselves and building the new on the smouldering ashes of the old. There’s a darkness at the core of the western, one that bleeds beautifully into darker, more fantastical genres like horror and science fiction. And Westworld is a hybrid of all three.
In honor of the re-birth of Westworld, we’ve cherry-picked 13 irreverent genre hybrids that exploit the western and mash them up with a sense of the fantastique. Have a look at our list and see if your fave made the cut…
Weird Westerns
-
Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula (1966)
Veteran director William Beaudine's final film (along with his other horror western Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter) offers a great turn by John Carradine as Dracula, squaring off against the legendary outlaw. Tacky and trashy but great D-level escapist fun.
-
Django (1966)
Sergio Corbucci's punishing Italian western isn't as lyrical as Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns" but is filled with Gothic horror touches, eccentricities and brutal violence. Quentin Tarantino was such a fan he made his own (radically different) Django film decades later.
-
The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
Legendary dino-western with cool stop-motion creature FX by Ray Harryhausen and armed with elements of King Kong. No surprise, since the project was devised by Harryhausen mentor and Kong creator Willis O'Brien before he died. A charming, silly and action packed romp with hustling vaudevillian cowpokes facing off against small horses and hungry monsters.
-
El Topo (1971)
Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky's deranged existential, mystical horror western mines the tropes of the Italian oater and weaves in a Fellini-esque sense of the absurd with then edgy sexuality. The result was one of the first authentic "midnight movies", a movie that John Lennon and Yoko Ono would get high to every night in New York.
-
Westworld (1973)
The blueprint for the current HBO series, Michael Crichton's Westworld is a wild, inventive, witty and sometimes terrifying precursor to Crichton's Jurassic Park. Yul Brenner's monstrous and relentless gunfighter anticipates The Terminator and is infinitely more frightening. Tons of fun with a wicked extended climax.
-
Outland (1981)
Peter Hyams' slick space western is in fact a fairly faithful adaptation of the classic oater High Noon starring Sean Connery as the Marshall assigned to bring law to a mining colony on Jupiter's moon.
-
Near Dark (1987)
Writer Eric Red and director Kathryn Bigelow's masterful vampire western charts the bloodthirsty and bullet-heavy adventures of a clan of undead outlaws who maraud across the new west. Stylish and boasting an excellent cast that includes Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen. Amazing Tangerine Dream score too.
-
Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989)
Underrated western horror comedy directed by Waxwork's Anthony Hickox and starring David Carradine and Bruce Campbell. In it, a band of cowpoke vamps try to live peacefully on fabricated blood while elder ghouls try to revert the bloodsuckers back to their human killing ways. An absolute joy that needs more love.
-
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
Considered at the time to to be the bottom of maverick director John Carpenter's cinematic barrel, Ghosts of Mars is now garnering a solid foundation of fans. And it should. The movie is yet another JC western riff, this time an amalgam of his own Escape from New York/LA (which were themselves westerns), Rio Bravo and 3:10 to Yuma. The angry evils spirits on the red planet posses the bodies of a mining colony and turn them into zombie warriors who delight in decapitation. Killer cast, great sense of pulp humor, punishing JC soundtrack and a badass train climax make this the director's true dark horse horror hybrid.
-
Ravenous (2007)
The late Antonia Bird's deranged horror comedy features Guy Pearce as a disgraced Lieutenant during the Mexican-American war who faces off against a vampire cannibal Colonel (Robert Carlyle). Beautifully mounted period western with nods to the Albert Packer story and filled to the puking point with blood and weirdness and black comedy. And rather delicious looking human stew.
-
The Burrowers (2008)
Director J.T. Petty's haunting creature feature is actually a sort of remake of John Ford's The Searchers. Clancy Brown offers a career best turn as a lawman hunting a missing frontier family and who, along with his posse, ends up meeting the titular beasts. Another criminally undervalued weird western that you need to see.
-
Cowboys Vs. Aliens (2010)
Scott Mitchell Rosenberg's acclaimed graphic novel serves as the basis for this rousing pulp fantasy, with a game cast that includes Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. It's exactly what the title says it is and it's played wonderfully straight. A top-drawer weird west wonder that's destined to become a cult classic.
-
Bone Tomahawk (2015)
S. Craig Zahler's magnificent western-tinted version of Cannibal Holocaust pits Kurt Russell and Patrick Wilson against a stone-aged tribe of cannibalistic natives that don't take kindly to trespassers. Lyrical, beautifully shot and expertly acted, the movie earns all the accolades it has received.
