Vampires and the Western

Abstract

At first blush, the vampire and Western genres appear strange bedfellows, with the undead an incongruous addition to frontier tales of cowboys and native Americans. Yet there is a small canon of films and other media that make up the niche subgenre of vampire Westerns, and the limited scholarship on many of these texts (particularly in conversation with each other) means there is still space for an evaluation. Thus, this chapter offers an overview of some of the major texts linked to the vampire Western, conducting a survey of the subgenre’s development and offering some close readings of key and underdiscussed works. It begins at the peak of the cinematic Western genre itself around the 1950s and transitions to a period of genre revisionism that saw a much greater flexibility in how the Western was presented, one that led to a small but not insignificant quantity of vampire Western hybrid films. However, screen media is just one example of the ways that these two genres have been fused, and so the survey also takes us to the modern day and the release of a number of video games that place the vampire in the Old West. It demonstrates how bringing these two genres into contact leads to some fascinating readings and reflects on representations of the vampire, drawing out some of the connections in relation to faith and travel, thematic ideas that have generally been present in the vampire mythology but which are frequent parts of the Western too.