One of my goals in the coming months is to cover more movies made in the past twenty-four years. After the nineties, a decade where most monster movies were either unambitious direct-to-video schlock or unambitious Hollywood blockbuster schlock, the new millennium seemed to usher a slew of lower budget indie creature features made by enthusiasts with fresh ideas, given a wider audience thanks to the thriving genre film festival circuit. These ready-made cult films could vary in tone and quality, but you could still sense the verve and imagination returning to the genre after that decade-long hibernation.
In that spirit of experimentation, The Burrowers combines the monster movie with a western, an established but infrequent combination. I’ve said this the last few times I’ve covered a western/monster movie mash-up, but the two styles work well together, with the western’s untamed setting and sense of isolation providing the kinds of spaces where the unknown can creep in, giving new ways to mythologize lands that are now completely familiar to us. That comes into play even more here, as we’re dealing with something of a revisionist western, casting a caustic eye on the colonialist myths of the American frontier—a place of human horror that also has room for some of the inhuman kind as well.
Set in the Dakota Territory in 1879, The Burrowers bands together a group of often disconnected people to solve a mystery across the vast open plains, but there’s always a sense of distance between what they are trying to do and what is actually happening. Although sometimes pitching itself as a pastiche of John Ford’s The Searchers, with its posse of frontiersmen thinking they’re saving a group of white women from a band of Native Americans, we know from the hop that they’re dealing with something else entirely, and that they aren’t going to be saving anyone. As it turns out, they have to do a lot of journeying before they figure out that something monstrous is afoot.
The first of the crew we meet is Irish immigrant Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary), whose lady love was among the members of a family who have disappeared from their farm after an attack whose perpetrators remain unseen by us—he has the most direct connection to the events, but strangely, he seems to fade into the background for chunks of the film. After discovering the bodies of the family members who were not taken after the massacre, he calls up another local, John Clay (good ol’ Clancy Brown, who unfortunately doesn’t stick around for as long as you’d want), and learns that there have been waves of violence in the area, a problem that they’re going to need a larger group to solve. They join up with the cavalry of literal moustache twirler Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison, former X-Files villain turned sleazy tabloid fodder), who sees it all as an opportunity to gallop around the plains tormenting and murdering whatever Indians his group happens upon. Figuring out that Victor is too much of an egotistical sadist to actually do any proper sleuthing, Coffey and Clay break off alongside William Parcher (William Mapother) and enthusiastic/useless teenage hanger-on Dobie (Galin Hutchison) to crack the case themselves.
The movie draws its lines quite clear: despite being “professional Indian hunters”, people like Clay and Parcher are the rational ones who don’t take to the pointless cruelty and think they have a better chance of finding whatever indigenous raiders they’re seeking out (Parcher can even speak some of the local tribes’ languages!) Meanwhile, Victor and his crew are hardcore racists who use despicable methods to haphazardly solve the “problem”—made even more insidious when Victor gets “his Indian” Ten Bear (Anthony Parker) to physically torture a lone Sioux they find out on the plains, who calls him out for his traitorous ways as he is grilled in their language. Coffey remains an outside observer, bonding with the freedmen worker Walnut Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas) over their mutual underclass status (both talk about not being able to find work because of their race/ethnicity.)
The Sioux man is the first one to mention that they’ve been dealing with something called “The Burrowers”, which Ten Bear completely misinterprets to the rest of the posse. It’s a common occurrence throughout the movie that people, intentionally and not, mangle whatever the indigenous characters tell them, which usually leads to less than stellar results for them (including more than a few bloody shootouts between our “heroes” and people who we can assume are dealing with the same secret monster problems they are.) It’s clear that the barrier of communication is not insurmountable, it’s just that many on the settler side pretend that it is.
When the group finds a indigenous woman and Parcher actually listens to what she says—which probably takes the movie a lot longer to get to than it should, after spinning its wheels with early monster attack scenes and the aforementioned shootouts—we finally get a clear picture of what the titular Burrowers actually are. Disgusting pug-faced flesh-beasts, gifted with those dislocated/grasshopper limbs that were en vogue in monster designs in the late 2000s as if everyone rewatched Xtro at the same time (one noteworthy visual quirk is that those weird legs have a tendency to poke above the waving grass as they silently stalk the nighttime prairies), these creatures dig to the surface “every three generations” to feed—usually, it’s on bison, but guess what there’s significantly less of since the settlers moved in? Subsequently, they’ve been forced to find another food source, and guess what there’s a lot more of available all of sudden? Invoking the death of the American Bison is the same move pulled by another pseudo-revisionist western I’ve written about, The White Buffalo, as a symbol of the way colonialist has reshaped the landscape and messed up the indigenous peoples’ way of life, with even more unexpectedly nightmarish results. In this case, those results are depicted as being fairly grounded, with no air of the mystical/supernatural—every character, indigenous or settler, treats them as animals made dangerous thanks to the devastated ecosystem.
Most of the actors are affable but clearly “playing cowboy”, rarely aspiring to any sort of realism, but the actual environments are shot with some eye towards capturing the natural ominous qualities of the untapped plains, spaces where there is very little place to hide except the tall grass –and wouldn’t you know it, that’s where the tmonsters choose to hide all the time! Writer-director JT Petty (director of one of the direct-to-video Mimic sequels and a prominent writer for video games like the Splinter Cell series) , who based this movie on a short film he crafted, clearly realized the horror potential of open spaces, as seen in movies from Them! to Razorback to Nope. Of course, Petty finds time to apply all the standard beige-gray mid-2000s filters to give it a dated murk, but there’s a surprising amount of variety in the camerawork and shot styles—in the nighttime scenes, it regularly cuts to straight-on shots of the grass, with a grainy look that makes those shots look almost like security cam footage, as we tensely wait for something to happen in the quiet emptiness.
There was also plenty of thought put into the monsters themselves, which are classical puppets/guys-in-suits with occasional use of CGI (although there are a few moments of terrible-looking CGI blood), with an emphasis on crafting the most unsettling looking thing with the most unsettling hunting methods. The creatures’ preference is to cut a surface-level wound in the neck and then drool a venom that causes full body paralysis, taking the immobilized-but-still-conscious victims and burying them in the dirt so they can find them later and eat the “soft parts.” Some of the most effectively unnerving imagery involves the victims, both the ones our crew ends up finding—such as a girl that Dobie is tasked with taking to a nearby fort, and along the way decides to plant a kiss on her half-dead lips in the grossest possible awkward-teenage-boy move—and the ones that they don’t, who remain nothing more than unblinking eyes looking up from the dirt. After one attack, Parcher ends up with a slash in his face and a bit of the venom, leading to a dragged-out process of his body and mind deteriorating while he faces the knowledge that the wound will allow the Burrowers to track him down and finish the job. He reacts badly to being marked for death and mucks up the rest of the journey with his erratic behaviour, an unexpected character turn after he spent most of the movie as one of the most capable figures.
There’s a lot of self-inflicted chaos and misunderstanding throughout the film, especially in the big climax where two Ute warriors—who speak French, a language that only Coffey can translate—take the unwilling and delirious Parcher to use as bait for the Burrowers. In the process of fighting one of the men and then getting his leg caught in a bear trap, Coffey learns that they had covered Parcher in some kind of poison that stuns the monsters, giving him time to pin them to the ground with spears and watch them melt in the sunlight. The big twist is that, after it seems like our crew and their indigenous allies have come to terms and figured out a way to deal with the real threat, Victor marches back in after being gone for most of the movie, hangs their native allies, “accidentally” kills Walnut in a botched leg amputation, and assures Coffey that they’ll be rounding up and dealing with the Ute in no time, oblivious to everything they learned and dismantling their opportunity to deal with the Burrowers. The last scene, played over the beginning of the credits, shows a pack of the creatures returning to the buried body of Dobie and digging in.
This shock ending is not something that comes out of nowhere—it, in fact, fits the tone of self-defeating irrationality that was present throughout it, the lack of understanding frustrating every action. I think the issue is that the cynical bleakness of the conclusion doesn’t quite register, if only because the pacing of the movie and its oddly undercooked approach to the characters means that the horror, of both the monsters’ unabated reign of terror and the appalling genocidal violence and ignorance of the settlers, feels more like an idea being proposed rather than a visceral gut punch (it probably would have helped if either of those indigenous characters had been around long enough to register as fully-realized human beings.) The stunned look on Coffey’s face as he witnesses everything he’s done unravel should read as “Oh my god”, but it really feels more like “Oh, goddammit”…which is problem when you have a twist dealing with subject matter this dark.
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