After transforming the old west into the cool, cruel mercenary world of the Clint Eastwood Dollar films and defining the style and attitude of the spaghetti western, Sergio Leone made this honest to God American western epic. Once Upon a Time in the West was shot (like his Eastwood films) largely in Spain but he managed to get stateside for stunning footage set in the wonderland of John Ford’s mythic landscape: Monument Valley. Into this dream American West, Leone drops Charles Bronson as his slow-talking, harmonica playing hero, Henry Fonda as a steely, blue eyed killer, Jason Robards as a notorious criminal who signs on with the good guys and Claudia Cardinale as the fallen woman turned beautiful widow who stakes out her claim for the American Dream after her new husband and his entire family have been massacred.

Sergio Leone channels John Ford's mythic frontier

Leone transforms western tropes into a horseback epic of bad guys with a heart of gold and an iron engine that reshapes the landscape as its tracks are laid through the wilderness, and he pays tribute to the genre by casting such iconic screen faces as Woody Strode, Jack Elam, Keenan Wynn, and Lionel Stander in supporting roles. Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento co-wrote the screenplay and Ennio Morricone’s operatic score is sublime. It flopped when it was released in 1968 but decades later loving tribute to the myth of the American Frontier stands out as Leone’s masterpiece, a sun-baked blast of frontier opera and one of the most glorious and greatest westerns ever made.

Plays at NWFF December 11-17 as the final film in their ‘69 retrospective.

When I penned a list of the ten best Horror/Westerns for IFC a while back, I contacted Mark Rahner and Robert Horton, writers/creators of the (at the time unreleased) comic book Rotten, for some comments and insights. Rotten is a set in the American West just after the end of the civil war, where two American agents are sent to investigate an alarming phenomenon: dead folks are rising from their graves as flesh-eating ghouls. That’s right, it’s a zombie western, strewn with influences ranging from the sixties TV series The Wild, Wild West to the political history of the past eight years.

"Rotten" cover art by Dan Dougherty

“The first issue is an over-ambitious 52 pages and the rest will be normal-sized and around 22 pages or so,” Mark wrote me at the time, still awaiting the release of the first issue. “It’s also worth noting that this is a creator-owned title, which entails creative independence you don’t tend much to see with big companies and their licensed characters—not to mention a financial roll of the dice.”

In the interest of full disclosure, let me state up front that Rahner and Horton are both friends of mine and colleagues. I’ve known them both for many years and have watched them develop this project for the past three years. I couldn’t be more thrilled that it’s finally crawling out of the soil and stumbling out to hopefully take a big meaty bite out of the comic book culture.

The Q&A was conducted via E-mail, the preferred format for these writers, over a couple of weeks in April, 2009. The comic should be released this week. As of this writing, I’ve only seen a few sample pages, but I like what I see.

Why a horror western?

Mark Rahner: It was a mash-up of my favorite genres that I hadn’t seen much of — with secret agents thrown into the mix, along with a good dose of social commentary that any fan of Battlestar Galactica, The Twilight Zone or the original Star Trek would dig. In other words, the kind of thing that my co-writer Robert Horton and I would have enjoyed reading if someone else had written it.

The steam-punk aspect also appealed to me as a new twist on zombies — which have been strip-mined in recent years. Throw a character into a miserable situation with no cell phones, cars, or even much understanding of germs or evolution. There were also some great parallels. The main character is a stop-lossed vet, his president took office without the popular vote, and the government’s lying about a terror crisis. But the hero’s a vet of the Civil war, not Iraq; instead of being installed by the Supreme Court like Bush, Rutherford B. Hayes took office in what was called “The Corrupt Bargain”; and the terror crisis … well, it’s not Middle Easterners with planes. It’s different incarnations of the living dead.

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In honor of the release of JT Petty’s The Burrowers, I put together a list of the best, most interesting and most noteworthy films to combine the genres of horror and western, for the IFC website.

Westerns and horror films are, more than any American film genres I can think of, viscerally grounded in mortality, the vulnerability of human flesh and the primal drive of survival instinct. Whether facing wild animals or bloodthirsty monsters, cold-blooded gunfighters or psychotic madmen, roving bands of raiders or packs of zombies, the heroes of these films fight to live. “It feels like a natural connection. They’re two of the most cinematic experiences that you have watching a movie,” notes director J.T. Petty. He should know — his film “The Burrowers,” which was released on DVD yesterday, is the most recent and one of the most creative approaches to the horror western hybrid, a unsettling monster movie by way of “The Searchers.”

The complete feature, and the countdown of ten films, is at IFC.com here. And no, Billy the Kid vs. Frankenstein versus Dracula is not on the list.

The deep sleep of a victim of "The Borrowers"

The Burrowers, JT Petty’s minor key take on the horror western, arrives direct to DVD on April 21. I interviewed JT Petty, the director, for Parallax View.

Clancy Brown and William Mapother in "The Burrowers"

Why a horror western?

I’m always trying to get a little bit outside the genre. I think people who watch scary movies now are such a sophisticated group of watchers. We’re probably the first generation that takes multiple viewings for granted, that you can see anything as many times as you want to see it. We’re sort of the video generation and the twenty-year-olds now just assume they can see anything they want anytime they want as many times as they want. So what’s already been done, we’ve seen so many times that I think it’s hard to actually scare people inside that framework. So once you get a little outside the genre, you can hopefully surprise people again.

What makes the combination of western and horror so resonant for you as a filmmaker?

A lot of it is just they’re two of the most cinematic experiences that you have watching a movie. If a horror movie does well, it’s entirely because of the direction, it’s classically not the performance. All the things that do make a horror movie pornographic also make it exceptionally cinematic. If you have a well directed horror movie with a crappy story and bad actors, it can still be a pretty awesome horror movie. And to some extent, the same thing with the western. All of those spaghetti westerns with dubbed voices and obvious cartoonish characters but have this amazing cinematic strength to them still resonate. So I guess horror and western movies are both, in a very specific way, the most cinematic movie you can make. Is that a fair statement to make?

Read the complete interview here.

My review of The Films of Budd Boetticher DVD box set is on the Turner Classic Movies website.

The films of Budd Boetticher have been criminally unavailable on home video. As of October, 2008, only four of his 35 features were available on DVD. That alone makes The Films of Budd Boetticher, a box set of five westerns directed by Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, an important release. That they represent some of the greatest American westerns of the fifties makes the set essential.

Randolph Scott flags down viewers for "The Tall T"

Budd Boetticher first directed Randolph Scott on Seven Men From Now, a western made for John Wayne’s production company, Batjac, written by first-time screenwriter Burt Kennedy. It was a lean script with sparing but rich dialogue and Boetticher’s direction matched the writing. Scott was so impressed with the film and pleased with Boetticher’s direction that he approached Boetticher to direct for his own Scott-Brown Productions. For their first production together, Scott acquired a property that screenwriter Burt Kennedy had developed for Batjac, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s short story The Captives. ” I had found the short story,” Kennedy recalled in an interview. “Duke’s company bought it and I was under contract and I wrote the script.” It was a perfect match for Scott’s persona and the film, renamed The Tall T, was the first of five films Boetticher directed for Scott and partner Harry Joe Brown.

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“If they move … kill ‘em.”

This line of dialogue, delivered by veteran outlaw Pike Bishop (William Holden) to his gang just before they rob a bank in a dusty frontier town, comes in the midst of the opening scene as preamble to the credit that reads, “Directed by Sam Peckinpah.” That’s not just a screen credit, that’s a director making an entrance onto the cultural landscape. It’s a threat, a dare, a provocation and an outlaw oath: These desperadoes are taking no prisoners, and neither is Peckinpah.

Holden’s aging Pike, abetted by his loyal lieutenant, Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), leads a ruthless gang of gunmen and killers made up of familiar veteran character actors (Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and Edmond O’Brien as the obligatory philosophical old coot) and new blood (courtesy of Jaime Sanchez and, briefly, Bo Hopkins as a decidedly psychotic young gun). Lying in wait for them is Pike’s former partner and one-time best friend, Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), sprung from prison by corporate bankers to put a stop to Pike and his gang.

The Wild Bunch blazed onto theater screens in the era of Bonnie and Clyde, when genre conventions were being blasted away and directors pushed the boundaries of what was once considered “acceptable.” Peckinpah, ever the irascible maverick, rode roughshod over every unspoken rule of on-screen violence in his portrait of mortality in the savage life of an outlaw.

The film’s opening robbery-turned-ambush is a bloodbath the likes of which had not been seen before on American screens, a spurting blast of pulp and poetry choreographed into a ballet of violence. Thornton doesn’t bother hiding his disgust with his scurvy, squabbling mercenaries (among them Peckinpah favorites Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones), who don’t care who gets hit in the crossfire as they compete for bounty. A lot of critics didn’t bother hiding their disgust, either, and the film was met with a storm of controversy.

But the film is also an elegiac epic set on the twilight of the frontier, a romantic spin on the myth of “honor among thieves” played as an apocalyptic saga of friendship and loyalty in a world where such notions have lost their currency. “When you side with a man,” says Pike, “you stick with him,” for better and for worse. In The Wild Bunch, both outcomes take place in a blaze of righteous, bloody glory.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.