INTRO: The horror western Bone Tomahawk feels like it’s the nightmare of someone who watched Tombstone and Cannibal Holocaust back-to-back while running a fever. Four doomed men, including the always amazing Kurt Russell, ride out on a rescue mission in the Old West. In a forbidden desert valley, they find that the villains they’re facing are a vicious tribe of cannibals. Guts are spilled. Flesh is consumed. It’s a jarring combination of genres. And also one that works incredibly well… which is why Bone Tomahawk happens to be the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
CREATORS / CAST: This movie marks the feature directorial debut of S. Craig Zahler, a writer who had sold over twenty screenplays before he decided to bring one of his scripts to the screen himself. He got into directing out of frustration: while he was paying his bills by selling scripts, only one of them had been turned into a movie. The 2011 horror film Asylum Blackout. He had written an adaptation of the anime series Robotech for Warner Brothers and Tobey Maguire. It didn’t go into production. Steven Spielberg and Park Chan-wook had both been interested in his western script The Brigands of Rattleborge. Neither of them actually made the movie. All of this writing with no movies to show for it wasn’t artistically satisfying. At least when Zahler wrote a novel he could get it published. He’s also a musician, and when he made music he could get an album released. He wanted that sort of payoff for his screenwriting endeavors. So he had to make it happen himself.
Zahler’s manager Dallas Sonnier suggested that he should make an adaptation of his novel Wraiths of the Broken Land. A shocking, violent western story about an outlaw gang seeking to rescue two sisters that have been forced into prostitution. Zahler wanted to make his movie on a lower budget, so Wraiths of the Broken Land wasn’t an option. The scope of the story was too big. But if Sonnier wanted a shocking, violent rescue mission western, he would deliver one. Just on a smaller scale. That’s when he started writing Bone Tomahawk.
Set in the 1890s, the story begins with a pair of criminals killing a group of sleeping men and stealing their belongings. But that’s not what gets these two in trouble. Problems arise for Buddy and Purvis when they decide to cut through a strange burial ground decorated with skeletal remains. While Buddy is attacked and eviscerated, Purvis runs for his life… and ends up in the small desert town of Bright Hope. It’s clear to Sheriff Franklin Hunt and Deputy Chicory that Purvis is bad news. He becomes violent when they try to talk to him, so Hunt shoots him in the leg. They take him to the jail, and since the local doctor is drunk they have to call on the doctor’s assistant Samantha O’Dwyer to get the bullet out of Purvis’s leg. Unfortunately, Purvis has been followed to Bright Hope by a tribe of brutal cannibals that still want to get revenge for him desecrating their burial ground. These cannibals kill a stable boy and abduct Purvis, Samantha, and Deputy Nick from the jail.
Hunt forms a rescue party that includes the somewhat dimwitted Chicory. Samantha’s husband Arthur, who is determined to trek through the desert to save his wife even though he’s nursing a broken leg. And the exceptionally arrogant John Brooder, a man who has killed over one hundred Native Americans in his life. Before these men set out to save Samantha and Deputy Nick – and sure, Purvis too, if they can – a Native American Professor warns them about who they’ll be up against. The Professor tells them the abductors are a cave-dwelling tribe of Indigenous people with no name and no language. He describes them as Troglodytes. A spoiled bloodline of inbred barbarians that live on forbidden territory, in a place called the Valley of the Starving Men.
The Professor considers this rescue mission to be a suicide mission, and has no intention of taking part in it. So Hunt, Chicory, Brooder, and Arthur O’Dwyer ride out on their own. Aiming to make the five day journey to the Valley of the Starving Men in three days. This journey does not go smoothly. Arthur’s injured leg is a serious issue. There are morally ambiguous encounters with other travelers. And they lose their horses, forcing them to finish the journey on foot. Which makes things even tougher for Arthur. But they do reach the valley. And find that the cave dwelling tribe is just as terrible and vicious as the Professor described. They attack with stunning speed and ferocity… and even commit one murder in a way that would have fit right in if it were shown in Cannibal Holocaust.
Things get quite gruesome and violent in Bone Tomahawk. Zahler was able to assemble an amazing cast to play the characters who witness and experience the violence. The movie appeals to genre fans right away by casting Sid Haig and David Arquette as Buddy and Purvis. When Sid Haig is the first person to be violenty killed off, you know this is serious business. The four men on the rescue mission are played by Kurt Russell, Richard Jenkins, Patrick Wilson, and Matthew Fox. Samantha is played by Lili Simmons, a relative newcomer who proved quite capable of holding her own on screen with her more established co-stars. Evan Jonigkeit’s Deputy Nick is at the center of one of the most shocking and memorable moments in the movie. And along the way we get quick appearances by the likes of Zahn McClarnon, Kathryn Morris, Sean Young, Fred Melamed, Maestro Harrell, James Tolken, Michael Paré, and The Lost Boys’ own Jamison Newlander.
BACKGROUND: Bone Tomahawk was always destined to have an impressive cast. When Zahler and Sonnier first sent the script out, it ended up in the hands of Peter Sarsgaard – who became the first actor to sign on. He was going to play Arthur O’Dwyer. Sarsgaard and Kurt Russell have the same agent, so the script was passed over to Russell next. And he signed on. Zahler had written the Chicory character specifically for Richard Jenkins, with his voice in mind. Jenkins actually changed his voice for the movie, speaking Chicory’s lines in a way Zahler hadn’t imagined… but it was a welcome change. And Zahler was glad to have Jenkins playing the character that was always intended for him. Timothy Olyphant was cast as John Brooder early in the process, and Jennifer Carpenter was cast as Samantha.
Sarsgaard, Olyphant, and Carpenter ended up having to drop out of the project due to scheduling issues because it took two years to get the movie funded. Sonnier was dedicated to helping Zahler bring the script to the screen in exactly the way it had been written, and told potential financiers that creative notes wouldn’t be accepted. But they received notes anyway. They were told that it wouldn’t be possible to shoot the script without a sixty day filming schedule and a ten million dollar budget. Some companies said they would contribute to the budget if Zahler committed to a ninety minute running time and gave them creative control. He wasn’t interested in compromising his vision for anybody. So Sonnier was eventually able to make a deal with a company called The Fyzz Facility: if Sonnier provided half of the budget out of his own pocket, Fyzz would provide the other half. And that’s how Bone Tomahawk ended up having a budget of one-point-eight million dollars.
With Sarsgaard, Olyphant, and Carpenter no longer available, but Russell and Jenkins still in firmly in place, Zahler brought in Wilson, Fox, and Simmons. Various filming locations had been considered over the years it took to find funding. New Mexico, Utah, Romania. But the movie ended up being shot in the Santa Monica Mountains – with a filming schedule of just twenty-one days. Zahler had to prove a lot of people wrong along the way. Financiers had warned him that even if he cut down the script, he wouldn’t be able to make the movie without a budget three or four times larger than the one he had. Crew members were telling him it wouldn’t be possible to shoot the entire script in twenty-one days. He was advised to cut pages before they started filming. But he decided he wasn’t going to cut pages until it was clear they were falling behind schedule. And they didn’t fall behind. The entire script was filmed, and he didn’t have to follow anyone’s guidelines when cutting the footage together. He didn’t have to make a ninety minute movie. The final cut of Bone Tomahawk reflects his vision for the film. All one hundred and thirty-two minutes of it.
It’s a good thing Bone Tomahawk didn’t go over schedule, because Kurt Russell had a very small window of opportunity to work on it. Filming on this movie wrapped on a Saturday, and the following Monday he started rehearsals for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. That’s why his characters in Bone Tomahawk and The Hateful Eight have a similar look: Russell was already growing out his Hateful Eight hair and mustache when he was working on this movie. If he didn’t need the hair for Tarantino’s movie, he said he would have cut it to play Sheriff Hunt.
It would have been understandable if someone of Russell’s standing had given up on this project and walked away from it during the struggle to find funding. But he stuck with it. He had faith in Zahler’s ability to direct a film because he had worked as a cinematographer before. He knew he was going to have a strong cast around him. And he was drawn to Zahler’s writing. He liked the script and the structure of it. The unique blending of genres… although neither he nor Zahler consider Bone Tomahawk to be a horror movie. Zahler considers the film to be a western through and through, with a dash of lost world fiction. A subgenre that deals with the discovery of unknown civilizations. He compared the story to the H. Rider Haggard novel King Solomon’s Mines. Which is about adventurer Allan Quatermain discovering a hidden civilization while leading a search and rescue party across Africa. He wanted to take a set-up like that and build his own western mythology within it. Speaking with Collider, Russell said that he stuck with Bone Tomahawk because, “I thought that it was an opportunity to do a movie that was in a new category. It’s its own category, I wouldn’t know what to call it. 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. I think it’s a graphic western, I think that’s fair. But we were kidding about it, the fact that if you went to a video store back in the day they had all these different movies and all these different sections. There’d be a section with a question mark and an exclamation point and under that would be one movie, Bone Tomahawk.”
Well, for the purposes of this video we’ll continue to call Bone Tomahawk a horror western instead of a question mark and exclamation point movie. And there are certain moments in this film that are so intense, viewers might not be able to endure them if they’re not already an established horror fan.
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Aside from the quick attacks on Sid Haig’s character and the stable boy early on, this movie does take its time getting to the horror. It might take too much time for some viewers. And the one hundred and thirty-two minute running time does feel a bit self-indulgent on Zahler’s part. He is not a filmmaker who believes that every scene needs to drive the plot forward. He’ll spend scenes on establishing the world the film takes place in. Learning more about characters. Or he’ll just include a scene to give the audience a laugh. There are plenty of scenes in Bone Tomahawk that don’t feel strictly necessary. But if you connect with the characters in the way Zahler is hoping you will, you wouldn’t want to lose any of the extra moments. You’ll want to spend as much time with these guys as possible.
Zahler did an excellent job writing the characters who go on the rescue mission and making them a likeable bunch. And each of the actors delivered a great performance while bringing them to life. We’re following a group of men on a dangerous mission as they spend days traveling through the desert, so things are not fun or comfortable for them. And yet Zahler and his cast still find ways to bring a lot of humor into the film. Whether it’s through scenes of Hunt and Chicory discussing things like how to read in the bathtub without getting your book wet. Or the vain and arrogant Brooder claiming to be the most intelligent person in their group because “Smart men don’t get married.”
After we’ve followed the characters on a long, difficult journey, they reach the Valley of the Starving Men. That’s when the horror kicks in. And it’s worth the wait. The troglodytes are terrifying, and do awful things to people we have come to care about. If you get restless during the traveling stretch of the film, just hold on. The movie is still able to dedicate nearly forty minutes to the characters dealing with the troglodytes. Trying to survive. And trying to wipe out the tribe so no one else will ever fall victim to them again.
BEST SCENE(S): Bone Tomahawk has moments of action and humor that are likely to stick with viewers after they watch it. But there’s one scene that’s more likely to get lodged in your brain than any other. The death of Deputy Nick, which Samantha, Hunt, and Chicory are forced to witness while being held captive by the troglodytes. This is the moment that’s reminiscent of Cannibal Holocaust. A movie that was brought up to Zahler multiple times when he was doing press interviews for his film. While he wishes Cannibal Holocaust didn’t have its moments of real animal deaths, he does think it’s an effective film overall. And admitted that it was an influence on Bone Tomahawk, particularly in the way it showed the violence. Speaking with DailyDead.com, Zahler said his movie has
“a very dry presentation of the violence in the same way as Cannibal Holocaust. The long shots of the horrible stuff happening to people, you just see it unfold. When you go in close, those aren’t perspectives anybody ever has on violence unless it’s happening to them firsthand. In which case they haven’t survived to watch the movie. So I kept the style consistent with the hideous violence as with Chicory and Sheriff Hunt talking about corn chowder.”
The death of Deputy Nick is supposed to be shocking and appalling – but Zahler also uses this moment to show how strong Sheriff Hunt is. Instead of freaking out, Hunt talks Nick through this horrendous moment. Assures him he will be avenged. So even while the viewer is cringing at the gore, Zahler is still taking the opportunity to do character work.
PARTING SHOT: Kurt Russell has starred in some awesome cult films and genre movies: Used Cars, Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Death Proof. Bone Tomahawk is a movie that’s worthy of being listed up there alongside the greats. Like several of those movies, it wasn’t a box office success. It didn’t even make five hundred thousand dollars during its small theatrical run. But it found its audience on home video, where it earned over four million dollars from DVD and Blu-ray sales. Now it stands as another cult classic on Russell’s filmography – and like its predecessors, it deserves to have a following that will grow with each passing year.
If you like westerns, Bone Tomahawk is a great one. If you like horror, Zahler welcomes you to the Valley of the Starving Men. And if you like the idea of the horror and western genres being blended together, sitting through Bone Tomahawk is a blissful way to spend two hours.
A couple previous episodes of the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series can be seen below. To see more, and to check out some of our other shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals YouTube channel – and subscribe while you’re there!
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