![]() ![]() Mad preachers and creepy undertakers and snake oil salesmen - all cleverness and theft.Ī perfect match then, the Western and the horror story. We’re sad we can’t talk more about that image, too.The literal becomes the metaphorical - the werewolf the true face of savagery and the ghost a dead memory that will not be forgotten.Īnd given that most Westerns take place in the Victorian era and when the American mania for religion was taking root, you’ve also got the dreadful eye of the Good Lord watching for sin and doubt to destroy and pox the lax and weak. But weird fiction is supernatural fiction, and linked inextricably with the gothic, so the focus is on horror and not Mr Spock in leather chaps. Sometimes, as in 1981’s Outland and anime like Cowboy Bebop, themes and imagery from the Western rocket off into space. Often, as in Cherie Priests’s excellent zombie Western Boneshaker, this is called steampunk, in which the technological concerns of sci fi play out. Sometimes Weird Westerns include science fiction as an element. Figures of almost myth.Īnd all that time, shadows have been following the cowboy. A romantic symbol of a time we know with our mind’s eye was dangerous and tragic, but we hope in our heart’s heart was real. Until here we are today, with the cowboy an international figure of masculine energy and ruggedness. Romanticised loners riding an unending path in these picturesque backdrops, isolated from society, yet existing above it, ethereal like. We think of Westerns as taking place in unforgiving, dangerous - sometimes achingly beautiful - terrain. At the same time, the famous Italian ‘ Spaghetti Westerns’, some of the best, had no problem in having absolute bastards, mentals and stone-cold killers as protagonists.Īnd more, of course. As a result of this expanding density of the genre, cowboys very quickly became morally complex figures. It made room for women leads, native stories and widened the scope of the Western in an almost ironic sense. Inspired by psychedelia, it was a strange genre that mixed in hippy bullshit while the revisionist Western tackled the complex legacy of the American nation’s activities on the frontier. "Romanticised loners riding an unending path in these picturesque backdrops, isolated from society, yet existing above it, ethereal like.” And so, they remained, up until the 1960s, where the spirit of the time was very much concerned with deconstructing the old. In the 1920s, they moved to film and were a staple of cinema, commoner than an underachieving superhero film is now. ![]() Slowly, they became unironic symbols of goodness, fighting off badmen and bushwhackers and, of course, Indians, to use the parlance. When they started out, recorded in the dime novels and story papers of the 1860s, they were just exciting tough guys. The cowboy means a lot of things to a lot of people. The rider on horseback in the desert sun, instruments of death strapped to his waist. ![]()
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