The absence of the apoetical Zombie/Western

My preoccupation with social context within cinema has lead me (and will generally lead other film enthusiasts) to two pivotal genres in film, which function within social roles, exhibiting characters who operate within these mandates and outside of them. Those two genres are the zombie film and the Western.

Cinematic History (A Primer)
The Western dates back to early television serials moving onto the big screen and really catching on between the 1930's (i.e. Stage Coach through the late '60's (i.e. Sergio Leone films of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West).

Likewise, the zombie films began around the same time with films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi, and moving through the history of the zombie film when George Romero reignited the genre with Night of the Living Dead and subsequent new school of zombie movies 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, and the Dawn of the Dead remake. (I refuse to call these films post-modern because they still rely heavily on modern narrative and composition, but instead I prefer the term new school because the filmmakers are trying to accomplish something of their own with an established genre of film.)

Where's the zombie Western?
Well, such a genre as a defined collection of films doesn't exist, as the wealth of movies to include in the genre aren't that numerous. A few films, such as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (Raimi would later go on to make The Quick and the Dead, a sort of Western homage with his own quirky signitures) and Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), directed by Michele Soavi -- a protege of Dario Argento, also known as Cemetery Man.

While neither of these films aren't wholly Western, their filmmakers and several references within the films, owe a great deal to the Western genre. However, each film does inititate some intertexuality with older ideologies of what a zombie film should be and creates a new string of circumstances into a new school narrative. Both deal heavily with the rise of the dead, and each has a hero who must (almost single handedly) destroy the "zombies" in the film. Here in lies a key difference with the Zombie genre:

Zombie films generly rely on a premis established by Romero in his earlier Dead films -- the inclusion of the social striations, or imitations of a class ruling system within a group. Most zombie films focus on a group of protagonists who must both run from the zombies and pursue the reanimated corpses. Within these groups, the issue of class generally surfaces, as it does in post-apocalyptic films, as particular individuals begin to assume roles within their on microcosm of society. The issue of leadership often surfaces creating internal conflict within the group as two (or more) Alpha personlities jockey for control over the subservients.

In Evil Dead and Dellamorte Dellamore the lone hero rises up to vanquish the dead. The Western protagonist often is alone and must combat not only the social order but the Other (zombies) as well. Shane and High Noon center around protagonists caught between these two worlds.


Filling the Void with the Dead
What would make a good zombie Western? A practice often used by Blade II and Hellboy director Guillermo Del Torro is to use Japanese anime to help him visualize angles and character placement. This almagation of film styles and Japanese pop culture may provide us with an easy enough solution, as we turn towards another form of sequential narrative in Japan, the manga. Manga is the Japanese equivilent to a comic book, but calling it a graphic novel may be more appropriate as manga generally includes multiple storylines and entails a greater mass of volume that American comic books.

Priest is a title in Japanese manga, which caught my eye because of it's expressionistic style and also it's dealings with the Western and zombie genre's. No where else had I found such an inclusive book in printed form than Priest. The title deals far more in the occult than Dellamorte Dellamore or Evil Dead, and it jumps timelines incredibly quick as the book actually entails over 100 years of history with parallel storylines.

The obvious problem with mixing the genres is the narrative premiss of inserting the idea of reanimated dead within the Western narrative, because the plots seem perpendicular of each other (which is mere product of social conveniences). But quickly following up on the emergence of the dead, the narrative structure would quickly unfold --

"Our lone hero, an outcast and outlaw, is the only individual able to protect a Western town that exhiled him from the undead menace" Our protagonist is caught between two seperate social conventions -- the townspeople that hate him and the zombies who want to devour him and the townspeople.

Other mandated genre symbols to include to propogate the dual-identity of the film: a cemetery (empty or full) and a freight train.