Movies
The Frightening Frontier: Five Horror Westerns to Stream This Week
The isolation of the Wild West, the ever-present danger of starvation, unforgiving terrain, and the rougher way of life in period settings make westerns well suited to the horror genre. Yet it’s not often that the two genres cross paths; the horror western is a niche subgenre compared to horror’s other genre pairings, like the horror-comedy.
Even the horror western’s more well known entries, like Near Dark or Ravenous, don’t appear on streaming often. Luckily, there are plenty of other entries in the horror western category on streaming, some overlooked, that capture the tension, isolation, and danger of the wild frontier.
Here’s where to stream five of them this week.
For more Stay Home, Watch Horror picks, click here.
Bone Tomahawk – AMC+, Hoopla, Netflix, Pluto TV, Roku Channel
When unseen attackers swoop in one night and steal horses and a few town residents, the town sheriff (Kurt Russell) sets off with a small search party to rescue them. The journey getting there is filled with injury, harsh conditions, and ruthless raiders. None of it prepares them for the vicious clan they’ll have to battle for their lives and the lives of the townsfolk they’ve come to save. If you thought you’d seen it all, Bone Tomahawk proves otherwise with some seriously creative use of gore and violence. This movie is pure western, right up until the horror barrels into you like a locomotive.
The Burrowers – Fandango at Home
Before video game writer J.T. Petty scared the pants off gamers with the Outlast series, he helmed this 2008 horror western set in 1879. With a cast full of names like Clancy Brown, Doug Hutchison, Jocelin Donahue, and more, The Burrowers follows a rescue party searching for a family that went missing under strange circumstances from a still unexplored territory. It’s not hostile Native Americans behind the disappearances, though, but a species of monstrous underground dwelling creatures. It’s the perfect merging of the two genres; the mounting tension between American soldiers and Native Americans makes for a great backdrop to the unique monster mythology that provides the supernatural terror.
Ghosts of Mars – Roku Channel
John Carpenter is no stranger to westerns, having leaned into the style and tropes of the genre for films like Assault on Precinct 13 and John Carpenter’s Vampires. Ghosts of Mars blends the western with sci-fi action, using Mars as an updated vision of the Wild West to set the stage for a lethal siege set at a remote, lawless outpost. A train factors heavily into the film’s climax, even. It’s retro storytelling meets futuristic style, creating a unique tone that audiences didn’t know what to do with in 2001. It’s the type of Carpenter movie where the possessed miners self-mutilate and feature character names like “Big Daddy Mars,” and boasts a cast that includes Ice Cube, Pam Grier, Clea Duvall, Jason Statham, and Natasha Henstridge. It’s not Carpenter’s greatest, but it is a lot of cheeky fun and makes for one of the more overlooked entries in horror westerns.
Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat – Tubi
Director Anthony Hickox (Waxwork, Hellraiser III) has a blast with his high concept horror comedy that sees vampires living in the reclusive desert town Purgatory. They seek a peaceful life, with the plan to get an artificial blood factory in operation. Everything goes off without a hitch until Van Helsing’s descendant, Robert Van Helsing (Bruce Campbell), arrives in town. It’s a vampire western horror comedy that lovingly pokes fun at vampire tropes. The simple setup becomes anything but thanks to town politics, new tourists, and Van Helsing’s irresistibility to a vampire (Deborah Foreman). David Carradine presides over the vampire hijinks as Count Jozek Mardulak. Sundown trades the nihilistic grit of your conventional western for lighthearted vampire fun.
The Wind – AMC+, Kanopy, Shudder
Lizzy is a resourceful woman living on a remote stretch of land in the late-1800s. The area is so untamed that the wind never seems to stop howling. Lizzy begins to suspect an evil presence has taken root between the howling and the isolation, though her husband dismisses her concerns as mere superstition. When a newlywed couple arrives at a nearby homestead, their presence amplifies Lizzy’s fears, setting into motion a shocking chain of events. Directed by Emma Tammi (Five Nights at Freddy’s), this indie chiller takes a slow-burn approach to psychological terror. Think something in the vein of Repulsion but on the frontier.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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