Carl Plantinga illuminates the fact that the Western offers a platform by which the great experiment that is the formation of America offers us a canvas where the nature of the imposition of forms of ‘civility’ with complications can be explored, and that the interstitial figure of the gunfighter intensifies the notion of the price of social order, where violence, death and its consequences can be approached, contemplated and complicated. He states that traditionally:

With the gunfighter comes fighting, and this more often than not means death, with violence being the propellent of this character trope. Screen violence too is pleasurable to those who enjoy the Western narrative, and however much it may be shrouded in notions of heroism, justice and corrective retribution, it is woven into this the enjoyment of death and dying in dramatic forms. Plantinga continues: ‘Rationalizations of just retribution often cover darker motivations which are disguised or displaced in tales of skilful gunplay and heroic action. All of this helps us justify our allegiance with and pleasure in the protagonist's violence’ (75). This chapter will explore some of the ways in which the Western has approached the gunfighter's introduction into a social grouping as a deathly pleasure-dome and uses the example of selected works of Clint Eastwood as a stage by which to investigate these issues.

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:

In April 2024, it was announced that the writer John Logan was to adapt Cormac Mcarthy's Blood Meridian for Director John Hillcoat (Variety, 2024). There have been many aborted attempts to transform McCarthy's 1985 South Western Gothic novel to the screen over the decades. In 1995, a screenplay was developed by Tommy Lee Jones with his intention to both direct and star in the film. This version was abandoned because of its extreme and violent content. Ridley Scott later attempted to bring the book to the screen with a script developed in 2004, but again, the unpalatable content at the heart of the narrative proved to be an insurmountable problem. Scott stated that ‘[i]f you’re going to do Blood Meridian you’ve got to go the whole nine yards into the blood bath, and there's no answer to the blood bath, that's part of the story, just the way it is and the way it was’ (Empire, 2008) and that ultimately, ‘you can't apologise for the violence’ (Film, 2024). Others have attempted to bring the novel to the screen including Todd Field and James Franco, but it is clear that the fundamental issue of the savage, nihilistic and relentless nature of the book's content has thus far been an unsolvable issue.

Blood Meridian tells the story of an unnamed narrator (The Kid), who, lost in an apocalyptic world of chaos of Texas in 1833, joins The Glanton Gang (a real life and notorious group of scalp hunters and fighters in the American/ Mexican war lead by John Joel Glanton) not out of any ideological or financial drive, but simply to survive in the whirlwind of gore and depravity he finds himself in. Blood Meridian spans decades and includes many references to true atrocities mixed with quasi-supernatural occurrences that boil down to a gnostic battle between various forces and individuals for the narrator's spirit. What holds the novel together, is its absolute commitment to depicting human savagery in its most intense and unfettered incarnations. It is perhaps not just the violent nature of Blood Meridian that has proven to be so problematic regarding the attempts to adapt it to the screen.

This chapter explores the notion of ‘living ghosts’; often vengeful revenants who track, stalk, haunt and terrorise the Western. The notion of the lone gunslinger as has already been discussed is a potent generic trope in the Western, and this chapter will explore the predatory counterpoint to this figure. Consider for instance, the mysterious spectre of Anton Chigurh ( Javier Bardem) in No Country for Old Men, a terrifying hitman, an unrelentingly chilling pursuant who, vampire-like, tracks down and kills his prey as they cling to the notion of survival. Such figures draw attention to the severity of the environment in the Western and they illuminate the fallacy of escape and security in the face of a grim, sinister fate. The chapter will consider the ways in which these ‘dead men walking’ haunt the neo-Western, drawing attention to the desolation of late-stage capitalism and its bleak environs. A good deal of these films are border narratives, and interstitial spaces are a fitting place for figures who haunt the Western. Jordan Savage draws attention to the strife that the imposition that borders create, in that they are a doomed attempt to bring order to a chaotic world, and intrinsic to imbalances of power. He states:

We will chart the cultural significance of these revenant, border inhabitants in the genre and select key case studies to highlight this significance. Historic and contemporary case studies will be compared in the context of the development of the Western as will the ways in which they circulate key themes in the genre such as morality, revenge and retribution.

Westerns are often regarded as one of North America's most distinctive contributions to film. As Jenny Barrett has stated, in an imaginative commentary on the genre with specific reference to the American Civil War; ‘the western has gone through numerous permutations whilst retaining certain narrative and stylistic conventions in its films that make them immediately recognisable to the viewers as westerns’ (58). Furthermore, Westerns have some of the most identifiably historic settings, themes and characters in cinema. Similarly, Westerns have always commented upon the contemporary culture which created them and engaged with America's definition of itself. As Andrew Patrick Nelson states, Westerns continue to explore ‘the present day and distant future’ (xx). However, this has presented a dilemma in such a recognisable genre. As Steve Neale has suggested, there is a problem with the ‘central role of iconography in the Western’ (27). It is as if, according to Neil Campbell, ‘by the very nature of its mythic representations’, there exists ‘a type of hyperreality, a simulation reproducing images conforming to some already defined, but possibly non-existent, sense of West-ness’ (2001, 130). This has allowed a collective hauntology to have taken place in the conceptualising of the West and the Western itself, and this is what this present volume will seek to explore.

Bone Tomahawk is a brutal and barbarous film. Relying in part on familiar conventions of the Western as a shorthand to cut through the need for exposition and arguably a sense of innovation, it invokes well-worn narrative structures and conventions (at least in the establishing act of the narrative). However, it surprises, shocks and disgusts in its willingness to cross boundaries in terms of its unwavering depiction of severe physical torture and gore. This correlates with the narrative itself, which begins with the crossing of boundaries, as two thieves enter territory clearly demarcated as sacred and perilous, and in doing so awake an unholy tribe of cave dwelling ‘Troglodytes’, which they and others assume to be a faction of a Native American tribe. What follows is an increasingly terrifying quest, fuelled by the noble requirement of rescuing an innocent kidnapped woman and a young sheriff (along with the thief who sets the whole treacherous set of events in motion), which climaxes in one of the most startlingly violent and grisly sequences ever seen in the Western film genre.

Bone Tomahawk then reveals itself to be unique in several ways, not least in its ambiguous coalition of genres which it draws into the Western trope (folk horror, survival horror, torture-porn, etc.) It is also though, almost comically subservient to the conventions of the ‘traditional’ Western. The core elements of the genre are so clearly established in the first half of the film that it could be seen (at a glance) to be a derivative Western adventure. The setting of the town where the protagonists live, Bright Hope, the saloon, the jail, the freshly built home are persistent in setting the scene for the Western period piece.

The landscape of the American West summoned up for those European pioneering labourers caught in its punishing midst an eerie solitude that many contemporary as well as subsequent writers and filmmakers have often evoked in their work. Yet this isolation, on the part of the settlers, was often accompanied by a haunted cultural baggage, often dredged up memories from a harrowing past, which meant that they were in truth never alone. This seeded what Benedict Anderson described as an ‘imagined’ community, constructed from remnants of memories of a past life, and torn up ‘cultural roots’, as well as an enfeebled anticipation of what was to come in the desolate canvas of a new life in an unforgiving landscape (10). This experience epitomised the stark reality behind the fatal pretence of the American melting pot, that lusty, potent myth, of an idyllic virgin arcadia waiting to be imprinted, explored and colonised by virtuous and industrious yeoman farmers about to test the myth ‘out West’, contrasting with a terrain bathed in the blood of the collision between supposed civilisation and ‘frontier savagery’, and out of which emerges ‘this America’. Instead, the immigrant hordes brought with them from their homelands not just their belongings, which they also carried on their ravaged, diseased bodies, but their psychologically damaged baggage; all their individual prejudices and psychoses, class conflicts, racial and ethnic hatreds and tribal loyalties, border tensions and neighbourly rivalries and religious bigotries, and all of which washed up on America's supposed undefiled shores. Europe, with its despotism, poverty and tyranny was a floundering sea vessel, gushing forth all its fateful debris.