In the great American West nobody can hear you when you scream

The thrill you get from movies comes from watching something you've never seen before. When filmmakers set fire to our dogmatic views. The amalgamation of the horror and western genres is a postmodern concept filmmakers have neglected to explore. Imagine the potential of watching films that exhibit these two distinct genre styles; John Ford's The Searchers meets John Carpenter's The Thing, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch meets Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, George Stevens Shane meets George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. It would create a fresh and innovative sensibility for filmmakers to explore. Epic visuals of faithful steeds stampeding through vast desert-like landscapes, old men sitting around an open fire and disgruntled desperados on horseback with Winchester rifles blazing through a cluster of flesh eating zombies. Hell yes!!!!!



The year is 1879. A family of settlers are under attack by an unknown antagonist. Locking themselves in the cellar, they discover something peculiar moving across the floorboards. The next morning, Fergus Coffey, an Irish immigrant, visits his sweetheart Maryanne. Opening the door, he finds a man lying in a pool of blood. His friends, John Clay and William Parcher believe they've been attacked by Indians. Going on a mission to find Maryanne, they discover something is following them. They find a female victim buried in the ground. She has a claw mark on her neck. The group assume the 'savage' Indians rapped her and left her for dead. Setting up camp, it soon dawns on them that they have a mysterious creature on their hands. Maybe it wasn't the Indians that kidnapped Maryanne after all…


The 2008 film, The Burrowers, is a prime example of this new horror/western hybrid. Directed by JT Petty, who's previous foray's into film was Mimic 3 (2003) and the documentary S&Man (2006). The film is based on an 18-minute prequel Blood Red Earth about two Native American hunters who find a deer carcass that they take back to their family to eat but soon discover the animal has been attacked and poisoned by something called a Burrower.

JT Petty wanted to use the far-reaching grassland of the American West to hide these Burrower's to generate suspense. Like Spielberg utilised water in Jaws to conceal the shark, the creature wouldn't be seen until the archetypal 'we need a bigger boat' moment. The mixing of horror and western is a fascinating arena (at its heart, Jaws was a horror/siege movie). Petty has said that, 'the two genres [horror and western] have a kind of peanut butter and chocolate quality to them'. If anyone has eaten a peanut butter and chocolate sandwich (Americanisms aside), you will know that these two ingredients create a distinct super-taste that's hard to resist.


The opening sequence of The Burrowers is a tour-de-force peanut butter and chocolate moment. A family are going about their daily duties when a gunshot suddenly reverberates throughout their house. The father grabs a shotgun and waits by the door as the camera creates a narrowing sense of imminent doom. An old man crashes into the house and tells them to hide in the cellar. We get a great birds-eye-view of the home as they climb inside the darkness of the underground crypt. Silence descends as indiscriminate gunshots pierce the soundtrack. Horses shriek. The family whimper as daylight spills through the floorboards and something smashes into their shelter. The oil-lamp crashes to the ground, flames lick at the wood as we are plunged into darkness. This is a perfect opening for a home invasion movie.


It would be easy to make comparisons between The Burrowers and the prevailing creature feature Tremors; underground beasts threaten the stability of a small community. Nevertheless, this movie is a different kind of monster. Not focusing on the slapstick humour of Tremors 'B-movie' humbleness, The Burrowers is a serious attempt at scaring the crap out of its audience. It's more similar to John Carpenters The Thing, which is inherently a Horror/Western as well as it adopts the siege mentality of Howard Hawks Rio Bravo. The director, JT Petty, creates a disturbing impending mood throughout The Burrowers, as if something is lurking outside the frame ready to pounce at us. The creatures are disturbing little things. They shuffle around like vampire Golems, slashing people's necks and excreting ooze on the fresh wound. It causes the victim to loose all movement in their body; they bury you alive in the ground and wait for your flesh to soften so they can drink your blood. You don't get to see these creatures much, this might be due to budgetary constraints but it also adds to the tension. What the hell do these creatures look like? Horror always works best when it hides in the shadows. The imagination is a much more powerful tool than real world visions. It fills in the gaps and taps into our subconscious fears (being buried alive by inhuman creatures tops my list).


It's refreshing to watch a horror movie that doesn't rely on a stalk-and-slash masked killer and a cast of beautiful boobs-in-your-face teens to 'entertain' its audience. Even though the film has numerous flaws, it's not cast dependent so you don't know who's going to survive this onslaught. It doesn't rely on over-stylised torture-porn gore to move the story along. It's a classy little horror movie that reverberates the thematic tensions of miss-communication. The folks shouldn't be afraid of the creatures; they should be scared of each other. It's a theme that George Romero's original fright-fest Night of the Living Dead explores. The ignorance of General Victor ('those blanket-heads will peel you like an orange boyyy') when he kidnaps and tortures an Indian without examining the facts is a harrowing sequence. You almost want the monsters to kill the psychotic General for his inherent evilness. Coffey, an Irish immigrant and Callaghan, the black cook, are repulsed by the violence and show humanity towards the prisoner by giving him food. You can clearly see the influences of Romero in these two characters. They are like the black and Irish protagonists in Day of the Dead. They are the outsiders that see the brutality of the establishment. As they sit around a fire at night, they discuss their predicament, 'No one will employ the Irish on account of us being a bunch thieves and beggars', Callaghan replies, 'Sounds familiar.'



Karl Geary who plays Coffey gives the film its glue, without his undercurrent anger of his sweetheart being kidnapped, the plot would fall apart. Saying this, the script is underdeveloped; we are only given a brief glimpse into their relationship with a few simple flashbacks. It doesn't build up our symphony. We don't really care for the characters because we don't know enough about them. There is no emotional valve so we can experience Coffey's feelings (the audience don't give a s*** about Maryanne). Nothing hardly happens as they trek across the countryside, it's a perpetual cycle of boredom filled with empty air and contrived dialogue. If your going to film simplicity, make it exciting by developing an inner conflict through the music and editing. JT Petty is an up and coming director but needs to develop dramatic tensions and character development (John Carpenter and George Romero were wizards at this). It's a shame really, because this movie has a lot of potential. If a little more time were spent on the screenplay in developing characters, it would have been an excellent movie. There is also hardly any reaction when Coffey and Callaghan are confronted by the creatures. There is no 'what the f***' scene. There's a great little sequence in The Thing when they discover the creature, 'You gotta be s***ting me'. This is the sort of line this movie needs. We need a reaction to cement the conflict. A sense of inner psychology and maybe a little bit of humour.



Even though the script is weak, the film does display an ambitious technical proficiency. The cinematography by Phil Parmet (who worked with Rob Zombie on the Halloween remake) fills the screen with epic shots that hark back to John Ford's archetypical frontier movie The Searchers. The music, composed by Joseph LoDuca (who worked with Sam Raimi on the Evil Dead trilogy) creates the eerie atmosphere that is vital for any horror movie.

You gotta give this straight to DVD release its due for trying something new.


Extras: Two short 5-minute featurette's about the making of the movie and the making of the monsters. The Region 1 version has a commentary track with the director.