American Primeval has been likened to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Photo / @americanprimevalofficial
Netflix’s savage drama American Primeval joins a long tradition of scalp-happy, gorily violent depictions of the frontier. Here are the best.
The Western looks set for new levels of brutality in gnarly new Netflix series American Primeval. Starring Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch, the series has been likened to
On the big screen, the bloody Western is a subgenre of its own. Far from the white-hat/black-hat narratives of the classic Western, and more visceral than the stylised shootouts of Clint Eastwood’s Spaghetti Westerns, the bloody Western takes the aggression and hostility of the frontier quite literally – or simply relishes in blood-pumping violence – in depictions of massacres, shootouts, savagery and fights for survival.
From Dutch director Martin Koolhaven, Brimstone has a relentlessness that veers from the Old West and into horror territory. Guy Pearce is a sinister, sadistic preacher who has an unholy obsession with Dakota Fanning’s mute midwife. Broken into four Tarantino-esque chapters that skip back and forth and unravel its mysteries, the film takes a harrowing turn when one character is tied by the neck using their own intestinal tract. From there, Koolhaven unholsters moments of hard-to-watch brutality – no tongue is safe from being cut out – while commanding performances from Pearce and Fanning keep its more exploitative edge in check.
This film starring Richard Harris came as part of a wave of more violent Westerns that clashed with real-world anxieties - in this case, a surge of Native American activism. Harris plays an English aristocrat who is enslaved by Sioux Indians but becomes a hero warrior. The Injun vs white man fighting is dated, though a scalping is still a scalping, even when the blood looks like splodgy red paint. More gruesome is a sun dance ritual in which Harris’ character has his pecs pierced by wooden pegs and then hangs in the air like something in a butcher’s window. The film was also controversial at the time for its depiction of the Sioux Indians.
The success of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars created a whole posse of imitators: violent, cheaply made Spaghetti Westerns. The most iconic – and among the most wantonly vicious – is this Sergio Corbucci-directed, censor-troubling film. Django (Franco Nero) is a Man with No Name knockoff who drags a coffin around and takes care of the filth on the Mexico border. He offs a gang of white supremacists with a machine gun and is later tortured by Mexican revolutionaries. Even with a pair of badly mangled hands, he wins a climactic six-on-one shootout. Corbucci’s film went on to inspire Tarantino’s bloody, blaxploitation slavery flick, Django Unchained (2012).
This overlooked Western looks like Little House on the Prairie to begin with, but Indians quickly scalp Rosamund Pike’s husband and shoot her three children. The rest of the film is a treatment on the trauma of violence with Christian Bale’s war-weary cavalryman ordered to escort a cancer-stricken Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) – an old adversary – back to sacred land. The shootouts are painfully real – as Timothée Chalamet’s doomed, wet-behind-the-ears soldier soon discovers. Everyone else is heavy with a sense of remorse and Bale’s hero soldier has apparently taken more scalps than Sitting Bull. It’s grim, mournful stuff.
With its slo-mo gunplay, sharp banter and Antonio Banderas’ sweeping hair, this Mexico-set revenge flick remains a benchmark for Nineties-style cinematic cool. Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez – a sequel to his ultra-low budget El Mariachi – it did for Westerns what Tarantino was doing for crime flicks (Tarantino has a cameo and gets his brains blown out). Banderas is a guitarist-turned-avenging angel who shoots his way through an entire cartel to seek revenge for a murdered lover. Salma Hayek, meanwhile, sizzles as his new gal. The violence is a dance – see a man spin in the air as his torso explodes with bullets – and Banderas handles his guns like maracas.
Far from the kind of John Wayne Western you might on afternoon telly, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult film is the original acid Western. It’s a lurid – but only occasionally lucid – odyssey of violence and mysticism. Chilean filmmaker Jodorowsky stars as the titular El Topo, a black-clad gunman who travels with a buck-naked child (played by his actual son). The film was a cult hit at midnight screenings – its fans included John Lennon – and plays like a stark-raving, peyote-infused fever dream. Some of the brutality is downright obscene – see images of disabled people being murdered – and Jodorowsky compounded its controversy with publicity-seeking claims that he did a rape scene for real, which he later retracted.
Clint Eastwood’s first Western as a director is less about splatter than striking violence. It begins as a standard Wild West fare: Eastwood plays a mysterious stranger who rides into town and agrees to defend the locals against a trio of soon-to-arrive outlaws. But this is hard-edged stuff – he shoots three men and openly rapes a woman within minutes of arriving. Incredibly, he’s still the hero and discovers that the townsfolk are worse than the incoming villains. He takes care of business in a finale before riding off again, hinting that he may in fact be the ghost of a whipped-to-death marshal.
Rooted in Wild West myth – the story of Garrett hunting down and killing Billy the Kid – this isn’t “Bloody” Sam Peckinpah’s best Western (or, indeed, his bloodiest) but it’s a stirringly violent, strangely melancholic masterwork, though Peckinpah was removed from the film post-production. James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson play Garrett and the Kid respectively, while Bob Dylan co-stars and provides the soundtrack. There’s an inevitability about its march to death, best captured in one affecting scene when Slim Pickens sits at the waterside, a bullet in his belly, fading away to the sound of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.
What starts as an unlikely odd-couple romance – between Peter Strauss’ naive soldier boy and Candice Bergen’s feisty dame – transforms into a restaging of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, when US Cavalry killed and mutilated up to 600 Cheyenne and Arapaho people. Directed by Ralph Nelson, Soldier Blue belongs to a strand of early Seventies Westerns that were sympathetic to Native peoples while demonising the white man – something it does with video nasty-level violence. Nelson went to extreme lengths, showing children being murdered and using amputee actors for scenes of realistic dismemberment. Controversial at the time, the film has shades of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, which came to light during production.
A sprawling satire on the Western, it stars Dustin Hoffman as the 120-year-old Jack Crabb, who recounts his life, raised by the Sioux but later trying to assimilate back into the white man’s world. Jack’s story weaves around the trappings of the Western genre as well as real history. Indeed, he’s not only a witness to myth-making in the Old West but a participant. He survives the Washita Massacre and accompanies Custer (Richard Mulligan) into the Battle of Little Bighorn. Though a much less exploitative film than Soldier Blue, released the same year, it also uses bloodshed to illustrate American guilt over the treatment of Native peoples.
For sheer brutality, few Westerns can outgun the savagery of this shocker. Written and directed by S Craig Zahler, it stars Kurt Russell as a small-town sheriff who leads a mission to rescue a woman and deputy from natives. These are not regular Injuns but cave-dwelling cannibals with a knack for gut-spilling, crotch-splitting atrocities. In the town, Russell’s lawman is determined to maintain law and order, but in the savage land there’s no such thing. The poor deputy’s fate is beyond nightmarish – the very thought of it makes you wince – and though the extreme violence borders on cartoonish, it’s no less frightening.
Quentin Tarantino’s Western traps eight strangers (or are they?) together during a blizzard in the Wyoming mountains. Kurt Russell and Samuel L Jackson are bounty hunters, starring alongside Jennifer Jason Leigh as a soon-to-hang murderess and Walton Goggins, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern as cowpokes, executioners and Civil War vets. Tarantino lays the groundwork with a solid two hours of finely crafted, racially charged banter before characters start literally spewing blood, marking an explosion of violence. As always with Tarantino, the power is in the dialogue – but here it’s punctuated with brain-splattering headshots.
From writer Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat, The Proposition transports the violence and hostility of the American West to the Australian Outback. Guy Pearce stars as a murderous Irish outlaw who’s sent on a mission to kill his even worse brother – played by Danny Huston – in order to be pardoned. A third brother, meanwhile, is held by the police and flogged. The violence is fleeting but simmers with the heat of the land, always ready to boil over. The maddening environment is personified by Ray Winstone’s police captain. He swelters and cries, knowing full well the gruesome reckoning coming his way – over Christmas dinner, no less.
Leonardo DiCaprio won an Oscar for his portrayal of Hugh Glass, the real-life fur trapper stranded by the Missouri River. After a scary Arikara raid – nobody likes an arrow through the throat – Glass is mauled by a bear and left for dead. The power of the film is the landscape. Indeed, the frontier has rarely looked so merciless. Leo fights for survival under the threat of Indians, rival trappers and a cold that somehow comes through the screen to chill your bones. Scalps – and testicles – are sliced off and the final stabby showdown between Glass and Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) is hard to look away from.
For sheer bloodshed and violence, Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece just can’t be beaten – a hyper-masculine, morally troubling bloodbath that saw Peckinpah use hundreds of guns, 900,000 rounds of ammunition and giant squibs filled with fake claret and burger meat. William Holden plays outlaw Pike Bishop, who leads his dastardly bunch into Mexico while a former partner-turned-bounty hunter pursues them. It culminates in a spectacular shootout with a Mexican general as the Wild Bunch – villains at heart – go out like heroes. Set in 1913, it comes relatively late in the Old West era and, like many Westerns, it’s about a transitional period – the death of the old ways. More than any other film on this list, it’s the Wild West going out in the blaze of bloody glory.
American Primeval is on Netflix from January 9.
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