In the next two chapters, we will explore a subset of the twenty-first century revisionist Westerns that have embraced the extremities of savagery and violence, woven into the DNA of so many Westerns on screen for over a century, but which have been amplified with grim relish in the postmillennial era. This shift towards ultraviolence has of course been hugely affected by the domestic terrorism of the Oklahoma City bombing, the tragic school shootings of Columbine and Sandy Hook, and the horrors of the events of 9/11, 2001. The century began with an attack against not only the symbolic sites in New York and those who suffered and lost their lives, but also on the ideologies, myths and narratives they represented. Many artforms responded to the attacks of 9/11. This can be seen on screen in the increased violent content and tone of such seminal television shows which have been part of the shifting landscape of television generally; productions such as Breaking Bad (2008–2013), The Walking Dead franchise (2010–present) and Homeland (2011–2020) have been viewed in the light of post 9/11 American culture (Takacs, 2012).

The brutal amplification of this ‘new’ viscera in the twenty-first century is seeded in the final year of the previous century in Antonia Bird's Ravenous (1999), which is, importantly, a hybrid horror-Western which embraces Gothic and horror tropes to convey the bleakness of the trials of survival in wartime, and reconfigures established notions of bravery and nobility and the barbarous extent to which people will go to survive. It has been argued though, that cinema has a particularly apt capacity as a cultural litmus. Terrence McSweeney writes: