Westerns = Horror ?

[Scott]

Can anyone here able to equate Westerns as a type of Horror film. Thinks about these things when considering Westerns beside the action parts. Here are some of the elements.

1) Gunfighters that are like killing machines
2) Coffins
3) Buried Up to your Neck
4) Dragged by horses
5) Guns, knives, axes, dynamite, slingshots
6) Hangings
7) Whippings
8) Blood
9) Rape
10) Murder
11) A horde of enemies

DEATH RIDES A HORSE made me think a little more about it. Its starts out with a horror atmosphere. I think the difference is Horror is more Psychopathic (without reason or abnormal reasoning) and Westerns are based more on Revenge. Sometimes the difference can't be seen.

[Chadzilla]

I think the western as horror movie could work, if they would just try to treat the material seriously.  High Plains Drifter seems a good attempt at a horror themed western.

[Scott]

I also think that Westerns have Machismo, Pusuit of Gold (wealth), and Revenge as elements that a Horror film dosn't have.

[Chadzilla]

Uh, revenge plays a big part in some horror movies.  Have you not seen The Abmonible Dr. Phibes, Friday the 13th, or Carrie?  Many other horror movies play on the seeking of revenge for wrongs real or imagined.

[Scott]

Your right Chadzilla. Vincent Price in bothTHEATER OF BLOOD and the PHIBES movies are definately revenge films.

[yaddo42]

Most serious western attempts at horror have involved ghost story elements, like INTO THE BADLANDS or GRIM PRARIE TALES. Even HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER is a ghost tale of sorts.

But there are horror elements that could work in a well written western tale: cannibalism (RAVENOUS, the Donner party, and Wendigo tales touch on this), witchcraft and shamanism (Indians could channel spirits or demons to seek revenge for massacres or to get back at crooked indian agents who sold rotten meat or let tribes starve), zombies (revived by said witchcraft or shamanism or tormented souls rising en masse after being wiped out by disease or the military. Some have said gunfighters were the serial killers and sociopaths of their day (although with greatly inflated tales of body counts). From what I've read John Wesley Hardin would certainly qualify. So the elements are there.

Tony Hillerman has made a cottage industry out of his Chee and Leaphorn mysteries set on and around a reservation in the Southwest. I don't see why horror in a western setting and timeframe couldn't work. Surely we can do better than JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER and BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA.

[Scott]

I hear that yaddo. I think I heard that John Carpenter is making a horror/western right now.

[Chadzilla]

Carpenter is a BIG western freak (he considers all his movies to be Westerns on some symbolic level or other).  I think he should five the horror/western another shot.  Ghosts of Mars, while I liked it, could have been much, much better.

Yeah, GoM WAS a western!  It was just set on Mars.

[gecko brothers]

hmmm.. I wonder what would from Dusk to Dawn3 be