Why Kurt Russell Says Bone Tomahawk Isn’t A “Horror Western,” But Still Compares It To His Classic Horror Movie With 85% On RT

Kurt Russell refuses to accept that Bone Tomahawk is a typical “Horror Western,” and, yet, he has compared it with his own classic 85% RT horror flick. Bone Tomahawk holds a Rotten Tomatoes critics score of 91%, suggesting that critics have almost unanimously praised the film for the chills and thrills it instills in viewers. The film’s audience score of 74% highlights that even though most viewers gave it a high rating, not many found it good enough. However, since most of its reviews have been positive, it would be fair to say it is a universally loved Western movie.

Another universal opinion about the film is that it deserves to be classified as a “Horror Western.” The reason being that it seamlessly blends traditional elements of Western cinema with the heart-pounding terrors of battling the unknown. Interestingly, however, even though the film unfolds a nightmarish narrative in the backdrop of a rugged frontier setting, Kurt Russell, who plays one of the main characters in Bone Tomahawk, does not want to categorize it as a “Horror Western.”

The Actor Refuses To Call It A Typical Horror Western

In an interview (via Collider), Kurt Russell opened up about how he sees Bone Tomahawk as its own category. “It’s not just a straight western, I’ve heard it referred to as a horror western, it’s not that, that’s kind of a bad call on it, I think,” he said, highlighting how he disagrees with the common categorization it gets from most viewers. He added that he would simply call it “a graphic western“ as that would be a fairer description of its category. While it is understandable where Kurt Russell is coming from, it is still hard not to see Bone Tomahawk as a Horror Western.

Although Bone Tomahawk unfolds its most gruesome death scenes towards the end of its runtime, it is thematically no different from survival horror flicks like The Hills Have Eyes and Let the Corpses Tan. Its most disturbing killing scene, in which the central troglodytes brutally mutilate a man, is also what one would expect to see in a body horror movie. Bone Tomahawk arguably also has Lovecraftian elements, given how many H.P. Lovecraft quotes perfectly capture the terrors experienced by its characters. Case in point:

• “Then fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave was, or had at one time been, a MAN!!!” — H.P. Lovecraft (The Beast in the Cave)
• “There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.” — H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)

Bone Tomahawk Has Similarities To The Thing, Despite Not Being A “Horror”

The Similarities Prove It Is Fair To Categorize It As A Survival Horror Thriller

Speaking of Lovecraftian horror, Kurt Russell also compared Bone Tomahawk with John Carpenter’s The Thing, saying that the troglodytes “are like The Thing.” He explained that he gets the comparison between the two movies because, just like the creature from the John Carpenter movie, even the troglodytes were only trying to survive. What Kurt Russell describes as a similarity between The Thing and Bone Tomahawk seems to be the premise of nearly every survival horror movie.

Even in survival horror thrillers like Barbarian and Prey, the main characters find themselves thrust into nightmarish situations, forced to face adversaries driven purely by their primal instincts. Bone Tomahawk only places this familiar narrative in a Western setting, making it a mishmash of two genres: Horror and Western. While it can still be called a genre-bending flick that does not fall into any particular category, it seems fair to label it as a “Horror Western.”

Bone Tomahawk is a Western film that follows Sheriff Franklin Hunt, who gathers together a group of fighters to save three kidnapped victims from a clan of cannibals. After the town’s doctor is kidnapped along with two others, forcing the sheriff to partner with the town’s Native American professor and find the tribe before it’s too late.

Director

S. Craig Zahler

Release Date

October 23, 2015

Writers

S. Craig Zahler

Runtime

132 minutes

Budget

$1.8 million

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