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.
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