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The BFI London Film Festival took us into the wild wild West this Saturday night with the gala presentation of S Craig Zahler’s genre-bending Bone Tomahawk. Zahler’s imaginative debut serves up a slice of cannibalistic horror alongside a good old-fashioned Western, with Kurt Russell turning in an assured performance at the head of a star-studded cast.
The tiny town of Bright Hope is in disarray after several citizens are spirited away in the night. Russell’s grizzled sheriff, Franklin Hunt, leads a ragtag posse of rescuers into the hills, confronting the surreal and unpredictable dangers lurking beneath the sandblasted landscape. Matthew Fox cuts a fine figure as dandified gunslinger John Brooder, and Patrick Wilson is Arthur O’Dwyer, whose wife Samantha (Lili Simmons) numbers among the abducted.
Director Zahler stopped to chat. “All of my Westerns get really dark at a certain point,” he said of the film’s exciting blend of genres. “As do my crime pieces, and those are the two genres I’ve written the most of.”
Though he didn’t necessarily set out to write a horror Western, that is what emerged. “When it gets nasty, it’s going to get really nasty, in ways that you haven’t seen before, because I just want to watch stuff I haven’t seen before,” he said. “I’m the first audience of everything that I write, and so I’m trying to come up with stuff that I would remember years after seeing the movie.”
“I would say that we were somewhat aware of potential response, but I think that we were cognisant of it and respectful of it,” said producer Dallas Sonnier when Empire asked him about the difficulties of working within the traditional Western movie framework of white settlers versus natives. “I think we were making a Western, and so we did what we had to do with the Western.”
Bone Tomahawk also stars Richard Jenkins and David Arquette, and will swagger into UK cinemas this December.
Reporting by Toni Flatley, with thanks to Go Think Big and O2.
from Empire News
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