Gone to Ground

The Burrowers (2008, directed by J. T. Petty) isn't the first genre film to channel The Searchers. I mean, you can see hints of The Searchers in movies from Star Wars to Taken. It's one of the most influential movies ever made, after all, so it's not a surprise to see it resurface in a horror movie even at this late date. I was thinking about this last night as the credits rolled at the end of the movie, because it seems perverse and funny to me that the two most influential narrative types in the horror movies of the last half century are Westerns (the other is Rio Bravo, by the way, which is the template upon which Night of the Living Dead and its imitators are built). I smiled a bit that I was finding an Nth generation version of this in a horror movie set in the American West, in which the central themes of racism and obsession are reenacted. Hell, it even has something of the same feel for landscapes.

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