Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (review)

The first episode of the television series The Walking Dead depicts deputy Rick Grimes, clad in cowboy hat and gear, riding his horse into a devastated—and zombified—Atlanta, a powerful image that links this contemporary and familiar zombie narrative with the distinctively American genre of the Western. This juxtaposition of genres that can easily escape the attention of a distracted spectator, or at least blend in with the rest of the zombie-related chaos, is employed by the authors of Undead in the West. Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier to underline the lengthy history and scarcely documented relationship between the horror and Western genres.

This collection of essays stresses the continued presence of the supernatural and the horrific in the cinematic frontier of the West, from movies as obvious as Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966) and Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966) to films where the undead characters are not physically dead, like Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a time in the West (1968) or Gore Verbinski’s Rango (2011), also touching upon such classics of the hybrid genre as John Carpenter’s Vampires and Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn. In all of these movies cowboys and colonizers have to fight both the dangers that inhabit the last frontier of the civilized world—natives, outlaws, and foreigners—as well as the beings that populate the frontier situated between life and death, between human and not human.

The breadth of topics addressed in the volume is wide — seventeen articles organized into three distinct sections, the first dealing with the reanimation of classic Western tropes, the second with the deconstruction of the moral order and the Western code, and the final with the undead as vigilante figure — and covers an ample taxonomy of movies and TV shows from different eras and contexts, giving the reader a critical and comprehensive picture of genres and subgenres.

The analyses of these essays are centered on filmic representations that often elude classification, making evident the inherent plasticity of the two genres. In this sense, the authors analyze the hybridity of topics and characters as well as the use of clichés or typical scenarios, as ways both to interrogate the genres and to address broader contemporary societal issues: for instance, immigration and the horror of the border in Planet Terror (2007), Vampires (1998) and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996); race and colonialism in Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) and Ravenous (1999); nationalism and consumerism in Land of the Dead (2005) and The Walking Dead; and sexualities and queerness in Vampires and Curse of the Undead (1959).

The frontier and its transformative powers become the hinge, the connective point, between two different genres whose own borders lose their materiality as they begin to merge. As Cynthia Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper assert in their introduction to the volume, “the central myths of the frontier are myths of transformation: the weak become strong; the defiant are conquered; the wild is tamed” (xxiii). One can add, in keeping with the essays compiled in the book, that the dead become alive and the Western becomes horrific, creating a new cinematographic category that doesn’t belong completely to any genre but works within the parameters of both.

Such attention to these cultural products and the research they inspire is particularly salient in the contemporary academy, where issues of hybridity expand the frontiers of the genres and create unique spaces for interdisciplinary approaches. The editors and writers of Undead in the West succeed in delivering an interdisciplinary book that both describes and analyzes the horror/Western discourse, highlighting both the points of contact between these two very different genres and the analytical richness of that mixture, both in political and social terms—that is, by reading movies and TV shows as...