The
other day I was shopping at my local DVD place and I saw a disc called “Brimstone”. I was immediately excited, because
I thought this was the cool late 90s TV show about a dead cop returned from
Hell to capture 113 escaped souls. It wasn’t. Instead it was some seedy
torture-porn series about violent religious persecution in a Wild West town.
Seriously not interested, folks. However, it gave me a flash of insight – there
seems to be a lot of creepy Western stuff out there at the moment, and I think
we’ve hit one of those pop-cultural nexus points once more.
It
seems to have kicked off with the “Magnificent
Seven” re-boot which, for the most part, seems to have been a vehicle to
keep Chris Pratt in trim between “Guardians”
flicks. And not weird in the least, although it set up a whole mess of Wild
West archetypes to ponder about. Then along comes “Preacher”, “Westworld”
and now “Brimstone”. Coincidentally, Flying Frog Games have kickstarted a new
boardgame in the interim called “Shadows
over Brimstone” with the premise that gateways have opened up into other
realities within the mines being worked around the town of Brimstone (apparently
‘Brimstone’ is what you call ‘Tombstone’ when Hell is involved). So it looks
like we’re back to being cowboys and indians for awhile.
Once
again, I’m led to muse about how forgetful we are as a species, especially when
it comes to such entertainment fare. Quote Santayana all you like, but when it
comes to popular entertainment, we’re doomed to repeat ourselves endlessly. Of
course Hollywood has always liked to push the Wild West shtick because it’s
cheap; we all recall how Gene Roddenberry promised the TV execs a Western show
and then delivered “Star Trek”
regardless, don’t we? Don’t we? Hmm…
Well,
before we start going off about how new all of this is, let’s take a few
moments to recall where all of this material came from and to re-acquaint ourselves
of all of the precursors, and give credit where it’s due. Otherwise, we’re
going to do the mummy-shuffle all over again…
Western
tropes have always been ripe for being overlain with material from other
genres. One of the earliest and best is the 1935 novel by Charles G. Finney
entitled The Circus of Dr. Lao. This
is the story of a western town being bought up by developers in a shady deal
which gets visited by a strange Chinese man riding a donkey, who brings a
magical circus to the community. In the course of the circus’s duration,
estranged lovers become re-united, deluded townsfolk have the blinkers ripped
from their eyes, evildoers see the error of their ways, and of course the shady
development deal is exposed. Dr. Lao has a knack of transforming into all kinds
of alter-egos, from Merlin, to the Medusa, to the Abominable Snowman, and he
uses these roles to save the troubled town. The book was successfully translated
to cinema in 1964 as “7 Faces of Dr. Lao”
and is well worth hunting down – it won an Oscar in 1965.
Ray
Bradbury was very strongly influenced by Finney’s book and we have Something Wicked This Way Comes as a result.
Along with this, Bradbury penned scores of short stories of strange events
taking place in the American Midwest, from The
Illustrated Man to the October
Country tales.
Jumping
forward (temporarily) to 1973, we get Clint Eastwood in “High Plains Drifter”. This is the tale of a stranger who comes to
the frontier town of Lago and starts to coerce the townsfolk into preparations for the
arrival of three riders who are steadily approaching. The stranger bullies the
town leaders into ceding control to him and orders them to, literally, paint
the town red, re-name it 'Hell', and prepare a feast for the riders. All Hell breaks loose when they
show up and he bullwhips all three to death. We are left wondering if he was the revenant
of the town’s former sheriff returning to exact vengeance on the killers and
townsfolk. It’s powerful stuff and reeks of Wild West spookiness. Some say 1985’s
“Pale Rider” is a sequel to it, but I’m
not convinced. Try them yourself and see what you think…
1965
to 1969 saw the TV show “The Wild Wild
West” violently attack our small screens to general acclaim, before being
switched off by the moral majority. This show is like Scooby-doo based in
America in the 1800s, but it proves how versatile the Wild West genre is when
it comes to being overlain with outside tropes. Again, don’t bother with the 1999
Will Smith film…
In
1972, John Albano and Tony DeZuniga launched a new DC comics character, Jonah
Hex in “All-Star Western Comics”
number 10. The hideously-scarred gunfighter with bad manners helmed the comic
title - which changed its name in issue 12 to “Weird
Western Tales” - right up until issue 38, whereupon he gained his own comics
title. Since then, as is usual with comics timelines and story arcs, things have
gotten very strange indeed. Zombies are a hallmark of Jonah Hex tales and one
narrative arc – “Riders of the Worm” –
involves pure Mythos fare. Jonah Hex (re-launched as part of the New 52) bounces around the DC universe
due to various time-travelling entities and organisations and has even had an
appearance in the “Legends of Tomorrow”
TV show. A 2010 movie starred Josh Brolin as Hex.
Speaking
of comics, the ultimate example of the genre as far as the Weird West is
concerned (in my opinion), has to be John Findley’s “Tex Arcana”. This strip ran in “Heavy
Metal” magazine from 1981 to 1985 and is quintessential Western horror. The
setting is the town of Hangman’s Corner and in three memorable storylines, the
citizens are attacked by a vampire, a werecoyote and various demons. The strips
are set up like the old EC Comics format with each episode being introduced by
the Old Claim-Jumper – it’s not easy to find (there are some online sites which
come and go) but it’s well worth it.
When
it comes to Westerns, I prefer mine with pasta; that’s not to say I can’t see
the quality of such fare as “Shane”
and “The Searchers”, but spaghetti
Westerns are more my speed. The arch stylings of these types of Westerns suits
the possibility of incorporating the Weird and Sam Raimi’s 1995 “The Quick and the Dead”, with its
comic-book pacing and cinematography, certainly proves my point. Jim Jarmusch’s
take on the Weird West, 1996’s “Dead Man”,
drops the mayhem into a gritty real world milieu
and is one of my all-time favourite flicks. Also check out Antonia Bird’s 1998 “Ravenous” which puts Western Horror
four-square into the frame and reminds me to fire up my Wayback Machine…
Ambrose
Bierce is heralded as one of the precursors of the Lovecraft Circle and is
responsible for The Devil’s Dictionary, acclaimed as one of the 100 Greatest Works of American Literature. Before his
disappearance in 1913, he wrote many short stories and other pieces which
display the power of horror in a frontier setting, chief among them “An Occurrence at Owl Creek” (1890) which
is regarded as one of the most anthologised short stories ever written. Even
his collected volumes of tales have intriguing titles, such as “Cobwebs from an Empty Skull” (1874) and
“A Bottomless Grave” (1977): here is everything
you really need for cowboy terror!
Not
forgetting, of course, Algernon Blackwood, whose “The Wendigo” (1910) is crucial to the Cthulhu Mythos, and which
conjures the silent emptiness of the wild frontier woodlands. Arthur Machen’s tripartite
novel The Three Impostors (1895) has,
as one of its extended diversions, a story set in the Weird West also.
Finally,
let’s not forget that the roleplaying game of the Weird West has been done
previously too. Shane Lacy Hensley’s “Deadlands”
has been with us since 1996, providing us with much undead gunslinger action.
It was released in a second edition in 1999 and then “reloaded” for re-release
in 2006. There is also a boardgame version.
*****
This
list is fairly disjointed, certainly not exhaustive, and non-chronological, but I hope that it’s enough to
forestall the exuberance which is bound to come: yes, mixing the Wild West with
the horror genre is fun and diverting, but please, let’s not kid ourselves that
it’s anything new (“Cowboys and Aliens”,
anyone?). It’s been with us, off and on, since the late Victorian era and so, let’s give those early sodbusters due credit, while breathlessly exulting over
the new iterations.
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