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.
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
The book is available in hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon at http://amzn.to/2hlkzsu or at your favorite bookseller.
It’s been a lot of work getting here.  Grateful thanks to Paul Fry, SST Publications. John Gallagher, Meredith Red, Pablo Ortega-Mateos, John Fallon. Arrow in the Head, JoBlo.com and Kya Aliana Shore.
“One of the perks of my 2013 summer was reading my bro ERIC RED’s THE GUNS OF SANTA SANGRE (which was re-released in March BTW ). A grisly, mean spirited and action packed book (read Jake Dee’s review here). On August 1st 2017 the sequel to that bad-boy THE WOLVES OF EL DIABLO (PRE-ORDER IT HERE) will gore up book shelves around the world (expect a review of it on the site soon). I recently managed to fire a couple of questions Red’s way about his upcoming novel and the impending third chapter of his “Men Who Walk Like Wolves” trilogy – here’s what he gunned back at me!
“The Wolves of El Diablo†is a Western and a werewolf story rolled up in one. So what would say is your favorite Western flick and you fav werewolf film? And your movie Bad Moon is not an option ☺?
My favorite western is The Wild Bunch. The Searchers, The Magnificent Seven, Once Upon A Time In The West, and the original True Grit are others. Bad Moon aside, don’t really have a favorite werewolf film. I guess if I had to pick, it would be old Universal The Wolfman with Lon Chaney Jr. because the Lawrence Talbot character is so classically tragic and the actor played him with such pathos. In my opinion, and people may disagree, there have not been a lot of good lycanthrope flicks throughout movie history—you’d think there must be because werewolves are so iconic a film monster but when you think about it there really aren’t, even if some have terrific special makeup effects. Werewolf films are kind of a lousy movie genre.
“The Wolves of El Diablo†is a sequel to your badass book: “The Guns of Santa Sangreâ€. How does the follow up differ from the first installment?
The first book was mostly set in a Mexican village in the 1800s where three American gunfighters, Tucker, Fix and Bodie are recruited by a peasant woman named Pilar to protect her town from a pack of werewolves who are Mexican bandits in human form led by a jefe named Mosca. The heroes end up kicking serious lycanthrope ass. The second book begins a month later during the next full moon where the three gunslingers rob a steam train loaded with silver protected by Mexican soldiers. The cowboys don’t know that Mosca, the leader of the werewolves they killed in the first book has a bloodthirsty vengeful bandit sister named Azul out for revenge. She and her wolf men ambush the heroes during the train robbery. Before long, the three gunfighters find themselves fighting fifty werewolves on a highballing stream train in the middle of the Mexican desert.
I like to say, using a movie analogy, The Wolves Of El Diablo is to The Guns Of Santa Sangre what Aliens was to Alien: More action, more werewolves, more silver bullets, bigger weapons. It’s a high-octane action novel. Do readers need to read the first book to fully appreciate the second one or can they go straight to Wolves? The Wolves of El Diablo can be read by itself if you haven’t read The Guns of Santa Sangre. It’s important in writing a book series that readers can start with any book in series and enjoy a self-contained complete reading experience. The trick for the author is to let them know what happened in the story up to that point without revealing too much that it would ruin the past books when they read those. The Wolves of El Diablo recaps the basic events of The Guns of Santa Sangre just enough so you know what’s going on but doesn’t give away too many spoilers…”
To read the rest of the interview go to the full article at: http://bit.ly/2vc5XSI
We talk about my new novel THE WOLVES OF EL DIABLO, western and horror books and films, and lots of other fun stuff: http://bit.ly/2upNDC2