The Western, I believe, is the ultimate genre.
The epic nomenclature of tough, strong cowboys in big hats with guns and horses pitted in physical and psychological contests of good versus evil fought on rugged frontier landscapes that externally mirror their own jagged internal natures is mythic and timeless. But while the entire world loves westerns, the U.S. owns the brand, and westerns remain our own uniquely American mythology and true contribution to pop culture. Westerns are the American Arthurian Legend.
Born from the harsh realities of the Old West, bred through a century of thrilling popular culture in novels and film that fired the public imagination, imprinted by books and movies that cross-pollinated each other to create a grand mythology that remains popular as ever today; it’s hard to tell now where the reality ends and myth begins with westerns, but cowboy good guys and bad guys are baked into our collective consciousness.
While there is a certain mystery to the mystique of the western, some things are certain: it’s a heroic genre, full of honor and nobility with bigger-than-life heroes and villains; it’s a physical genre, action-packed on the purest level with riding and fistfights and shooting; and it’s a cathartic genre, where morality tales about good versus evil end in a decisive, satisfying showdown at the climax that gives us a vicarious sense of triumph we rarely achieve in our complicated real world where right and wrong is not always clear.
Some part of us needs this as human beings on the deepest level, which is the appeal of all heroic mythologies going back forever. Reading or watching a western, however briefly, we experience the wish fulfillment of becoming the cowboys we played at being as kids and heroes we want to be as adults if only real life were as simple as saddling your horse, grabbing your guns, and riding to the rescue.
One of the things as a screenwriter and novelist I appreciate most about westerns is the genre can absorb every other genre into the storytelling; elements of other genres like thriller, mystery, crime, even horror, all can be injected into a western story. There is even a thriving genre of romance westerns! The classic template of cowboys and guns and horses and landscapes is a canvas that can be painted with many brushes; this very adaptability makes it such an exciting genre for a writer to explore.
While many folks know me for my horror and thriller films and books, in actuality westerns are my favorite genre and the genre I’ve worked the most in, having written and produced western movies, written western novels and even created a western comic book. The movie was an HBO film called The Last Outlaw starring Mickey Rourke, a gritty, bloody adventure about a gang of outlaws pursued by a posse led by their leader who they had left for dead.
Mixing the horror and western literary genres became the inspiration for my novels The Guns Of Santa Sangre and its sequel The Wolves Of El Diablo from SST Publications, about three tough American gunfighters battling several generations of werewolves who are bandits by day in Old Mexico.
My bestselling current western book series, the Joe Noose Westerns from Pinnacle Books & Kensington Books, revolves around the adventures of a tough and complex bounty hunter in 1800s Wyoming. With Noose, Hanging Fire, Branded and The Crimson Trail, the Noose series is on its fourth book with more to come.
My lifelong love of the Western genre continues to inspire me endlessly as a creative open range of possibilities always offering new frontiers in storytelling.
Saddle up.
Huge thanks to Arrow in the Head at JoBlo.com for a terrific tribute video article on my ghost movie 100 FEET. This is the best piece anybody has ever done on the film. Informative, fast-paced and full of great stuff about the flick, it is must viewing for fans of my work and horror fans in general.
During this period of everybody locked down in our homes sharing anxieties of isolation and dread, audiences can personally relate to 100 FEET in a way they couldn’t before, making the movie more frightening than ever. We’re all in lockdown inside our homes just like the movie’s heroine Marnie played by Famke Janssen but her problems are worse than yours since she’s shut in with the violent ghost of her dead husband who doesn’t believe in social distancing. The suffocating claustrophobia of Famke’s situation in the movie is so identifiable to us these days, viewing 100 FEET now may be unbearably intense for some of you, get in your head and give you nightmares. You have been warned.
100 FEET is my personal favorite of the films I’ve made and my best job as a director. It’s easy to frighten people with gore and jump scares but true skill in suspense lies in the creation of tension without any of that. It’s about manipulating audience expectations so just when they think something is about to happen, it doesn’t and when they least expect it, it does. 100 FEET is basically an entire movie with a woman alone in a house with a ghost. The ghost is almost never seen, and when ghost attacks are always terrifying and unexpected. This is a very Hitchcockian film of elevated suspense.
This movie got made during the trend of torture porn horror films so I wanted to go completely in the other direction and scare the hell of the audience without relying on kills or gory violence like everyone else was doing. And it worked. 100 FEET keeps you on the edge of your seat for ninety minutes and there is only one kill in the entire movie! What interested me making 100 FEET was using classic techniques of point of view and visual subliminal suggestion to generate tension and lead you around by the nose rather than hit you in the face.
As a director, it was a wonderful challenge. If you’ve seen 100 FEET before watch it again because you’ll get more out of seeing the film now than you did then. If you haven’t seen it, I would definitely not recommend watching it alone locked down in your house late at night.
Or maybe I would.
Trade paperback and digital editions available now from the publisher Savage Types in Germany.
Street date 1/28/19.
From Eric Red the writer of The Hitcher and the director of Body Parts, Bad Moon and 100 Feet comes the action and gore packed No Man’s Ridge!
A team of five heavily-armed extreme hunters go into the remote Wyoming wilderness to bag Bigfoot, but find themselves out-manned against a relentless killing machine when they trespass on the Sasquatch’s turf.
For news and updates, follow the Official No Man’s Ridge Facebook Page at https://www.facebook.com/nomansridge/
Eric Red is one of our favorite writers around here. How could we not love the work of the scribe who gave us such cool films as THE HITCHER, NEAR DARK, BLUE STEEL, BODY PARTS, BAD MOON, and 100 FEET (which featured Arrow in the Head founder John Fallon)? Back in 2015, Red wrote a novel titled WHITE KNUCKLE (you can read Jake Dee’s review of the novel at THIS LINK), and now we are excited to hear that he’s teaming up with Horror Equity Fund, Inc. to write and direct a film based on the novel.
Described as a “terrifying road thriller in the tradition of THE HITCHER”, WHITE KNUCKLE is
a gripping story of female empowerment about a woman who survives an attack by a serial killer, and then takes it upon herself to stop him from hurting anyone else.
For a more detailed synopsis, we can turn to the book’s description:
There’s a killer on the road… He’s a big rig truck driver who goes by the CB handle White Knuckle, and he’s Jack the Ripper on eighteen wheels. For thirty years he has murdered hundreds of women in unimaginable ways, imprisoning them in a secret compartment in his truck, abducting them in one state and dumping their dead bodies across the country. Dedicated FBI agent Sharon Ormsby is on a mission to hunt down and stop White Knuckle. She goes undercover as a truck driver with a helpful long hauler named Rudy in a cross-country pursuit that will ultimately bring her face-to-face with White Knuckle in a pedal-to-the-metal, high-octane climax on a highway to Hell.
Horror Equity Fund’s CEO Marlon Schulman, CCO Brian Herskowitz, and EVP Tony Timpone will be executive producing WHITE KNUCKLE. An entertainment company focused solely on the horror and thriller genres, Horror Equity Fund aims to “bring content creators, fans, and investors together and give them access to the tools that help them see their passions into profits”. The company is currently raising funds through a soon-to-close Regulation CF investment funding campaign.
Timpone promises that WHITE KNUCKLE will “keep people off the highways like JAWS kept ‘em out of the water”.
Read the full article at: http://bit.ly/2DYaTPL
For Immediate Release:
Visionary writer/director Eric Red is teaming with Horror Equity Fund for the new horror movie, WHITE KNUCKLE. Eric has crafted a script and will helm the movie based on his novel of the same name. Horror fans know Eric as the writer of genre favorites, Near Dark (1987) and The Hitcher (1986). He is also the writer / director of Body Parts (1991) and Bad Moon (1996).
WHITE KNUCKLE tells a gripping story of female empowerment about a woman who survives an attack by a serial killer, and then takes it upon herself to stop him from hurting anyone else.
Marlon Schulman CEO, Brian Herskowitz CCO, and Tony Timpone EVP of Horror Equity Fund have signed on as Executive Producers and plan on taking this project to the next level of horror entertainment.
Eric Red says, “I’m very excited to be joining forces with Marlon Schulman, Brian Herskowitz and Tony Timpone at Horror Equity Fund for my new film, WHITE KNUCKLE. It’s a great team to be working with making a terrifying road thriller in the tradition of THE HITCHER.â€
Tony Timpone says, “Very happy that the first project that I brought into Horror Equity Fund to be fast-tracked is Eric Red’s super-kinetic WHITE KNUCKLE. Eric’s previous work in the genre, THE HITCHER, NEAR DARK and BODY PARTS, were unique and terrifying. WHITE KNUCKLE will keep people off the highways like JAWS kept ’em out of the water. And HEF supporters can be part of the ride!â€
To read the full article on horrornews.net go to:Â http://horrornews.net/129123/creator-near-dark-hitcher-partners-horror-equity-fund-new-horror-movie-white-knuckle/
