10 Ruthlessly Violent Western Movies That Were Surprisingly Bloody – Armessa Movie News

When the clear-cut ethics of western movies turned out to be an idealized myth, the genre took a violent turn with rougher, bloodier visions of life in the Old West. The western genre started out with an optimistic view of justice and a morally black-and-white perspective of good versus evil. However, as time went on and the world became a lot more complicated, filmmakers challenged these tropes and conventions with morally gray antiheroes, real hardship on the frontier, and lots and lots of blood. Directors like Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Corbucci upended the genre’s traditions to deliver darker, grittier, and bloodier western movies.

There are a lot of spaghetti westerns with no good guys and an abundance of bloodshed (such as Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars). There are movies that incorporate gory horror elements in the well-worn western traditions (like Bone Tomahawk). While there are also acid westerns that play like a psychedelic drug trip, like El Topo, some may prefer to look at several Australian westerns, which tend to explore a different country’s troubled history (like The Proposition). Plenty of great westerns have ramped up the violence of early John Ford movies to include dark humor, gruesome close-ups, and buckets of blood.

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10 Keoma (1976)

An ex-Union gunfighter finds his hometown overrun by evil in Keoma (one of the last great spaghetti westerns of the Italian subgenre’s heyday). A year before he brought his unique vision of on-screen brutality to the war genre in The Inglorious Bastards, director Enzo G. Castellari splattered the frontier in fake blood in Keoma. Castellari uses plenty of his signature slow-motion to make the action feel more cinematic, and spaghetti western icon, Franco Nero, gives an engaging performance in the lead role.

9 High Plains Drifter (1973)

Clint Eastwood’s second directorial effort, High Plains Drifter, saw the iconic actor steer the western genre into the horror genre with a sinister demonic twist. The mysterious stranger that Eastwood plays, doling out his own brand of justice in a lawless western town, is either the reincarnation of a dead U.S. Marshal out to avenge his own death, or the Devil himself. High Plains Drifter saw Eastwood combine the filmmaking styles of his two closest collaborators; it mixes the grit of Don Siegel’s thrillers with the operatic extravagance of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western epics.

8 Bone Tomahawk (2015)

S. Craig Zahler would go on to alienate squeamish viewers with the urban ultraviolence of Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete, but his debut feature, Bone Tomahawk, took his bloody spectacle back to the Old West. It starts off as a pretty typical western, with a search party riding into the wilderness to recover a missing person. However, the movie takes a very disturbing, very violent turn when the party encounters a vicious cannibalistic cult. It certainly impressed critics, who lauded the actor’s gripping performances and the cinematography (via Rotten Tomatoes).

7 Cut-Throats Nine (1972)

Spaghetti western director, Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, delivered one of the most violent film of his career with 1972’s Cut-Throats Nine. When a wagon full of prisoners is attacked by bandits, a sergeant is tasked with transporting the survivors across the Rocky Mountains by foot. Cut-Throats Nine is one of the bleakest and bloodiest spaghetti westerns to come out of Spain. True to the spaghetti western ethos, there are no good guys in Cut-Throats Nine; there are only bad guys and morally ambiguous guys.

6 The Great Silence (1968)

Most western movies have a happy ending, or at least a bittersweet ending (even the most subversive westerns), but The Great Silence, helmed by spaghetti western pioneer Sergio Corbucci, is a harrowing tragedy where the villains triumph and no justice is served. A gunslinger, who is also mute, desperately tries to protect his town from ruthless bounty killers. Most westerns take place in the blistering sunshine, but The Great Silence has a snowbound, ice-cold setting to match its ice-cold cinematic sensibility.

5 The Proposition (2005)

One of the most iconic Australian westerns – often named “meat pie westerns” or “bushranger movies” – The Proposition revolves around a lawman who blackmails an outlaw into killing his older brother by threatening to kill his younger brother. The Proposition is just as eager to exact bloody revenge as the average western, but it takes a hauntingly realistic look at the resulting violence. In one particularly affecting scene, the townspeople cheer on as a criminal is dragged out into the street to be given 100 lashes. But less than halfway through the punishment, these baying spectators have all turned away in horror.

4 A Fistful Of Dollars (1964)

Leone and Eastwood created the spaghetti western from scratch with their trailblazing 1964 gem A Fistful of Dollars, a loose remake of Yojimbo set in a dusty western town where a stranger mediates a feud between two rival gangs. This movie marked the debut of Eastwood’s iconic “Man with No Name” antihero, who has provided a character template for everyone from Roland Deschain to the Mandalorian. A Fistful of Dollars was a terrific introduction to the gritty characters and graphic violence that Leone would become notorious for.

RELATED: 10 Essential Spaghetti Westerns

3 The Wild Bunch (1969)

Sam Peckinpah flipped western tropes on their head in his blood-drenched epic The Wild Bunch. Instead of following the lawmen trying to bring outlaws to justice, The Wild Bunch follows the outlaws themselves as they assemble for one last score: stealing a stash of silver from a railroad payroll office. The Wild Bunch is one of the roughest, toughest westerns ever made, scarcely giving viewers a second to catch their breath amidst all the gun-toting carnage.

2 El Topo (1970)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mind-bending acid western opus, El Topo, crosses western tropes with Eastern philosophy to tell the story of a black-clad gunfighter searching for enlightenment. The violence is dialed up to a surreal degree and the psychedelic visuals make for a cinematic drug trip. El Topo is a staple of the midnight movie circuit and boasts an impressive list of famous fans including John Lennon and David Lynch (via the BBC).

1 Django (1966)

Corbucci helped to establish Italy’s uniquely bloody reimagining of the western genre with his 1966 masterpiece Django. Starring Franco Nero in the title role, Django is another loose remake of Yojimbo set in a dusty western town with even rougher, grislier violence than A Fistful of Dollars. There’s an ear-severing, a machine gun shootout, and a showdown at a cemetery where Django uses his broken fingers to push his trigger against a headstone to gun down the bad guys. Django was popular and influential enough to spawn dozens of unofficial sequels capitalizing on the name Django, including Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.

Sources: Rotten Tomatoes, BBC