High Plains Drifter isn't the movie it leads you to think it is.

What starts as a darkly gritty and straightforward Western quickly evolves into a far more nuanced tale of deceit and betrayal.

A most magnificent Macabre Monday to one and all, my magnanimous mongers of most morose myths. Today I come to talk about a film that I really should’ve seen years ago: High Plains Drifter.

“But Man, that’s just one of those gritty Clint Eastwood Westerns, right?”

Funny you should say that, disembodied voice I’ve constructed to highlight my point. On first glance, High Plains Drifter is indeed yet another entry in Clint Eastwood’s storied career of gritty Westerns that got its start with Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars. However, this movie is much more than it initially appears to be, and it’s very quick to turn some of our old expectations on their heads.

Consider this your spoiler warning. If you haven’t watched High Plains Drifter yet, go do so. Open this up in a new tab, watch the movie, and then come back to this. It’ll still be here.

If you’re still here, prepare to be spoiled.

As with many a Western, High Plains Drifter opens on a lone rider in the high desert. He rides at a steady pace along the sand and the scrub with a surprisingly eerie soundtrack backing the opening. Inspired by American or Mexican folk music, this soundtrack certainly is not. Soon we see that this is exactly who we expect, Eastwood’s nameless character, who’s referred to by the script and credits as The Stranger. As he rides on, his horse trucking along in an amusingly angled canter - the big critter really did look like he was having some fun that morning - we see that this desert is situated next to a lake, and built alongside that lake is the city of Lago. Well, city according to its citizens, anyway. It’s really more of a small frontier town, but I digress.

Within the first ten minutes of the movie we see that The Stranger isn’t the usual sort of roguish and mercenary hero that Eastwood usually plays. Once he rides into the lakeside mining town of Lago, he quickly shows himself to be unscrupulous in a way that his previous portrayals of the nameless gunman trope haven’t been. While The Man With No Name was certainly self serving and bucked many heroic trends - he was a con man in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly after all - he didn’t go out of his way to make the lives of generally innocent people more difficult. As The Stranger, though, he’s quicker than ever to turn to violence and has no qualms about taking whatever he wants whenever he wants it, even though he knows full well the difficulty his actions cause the citizens of Lago.

In fact, this twist in portrayal was so shocking that my wife and I both jokingly stated, “Our hero, everybody!” as we watched those first ten minutes play out. Upon arriving into the town, as is often the trope, the locals look at him with wary suspicion. After hitching his horse and heading into the saloon for a beer and a whiskey, The Stranger is confronted by a trio of bruisers whom he has no time for. He ignores the brutes, brushing them off to cross the street for a shave from the town’s immensely nervous and shaky handed barber.

As expected, the three bruisers don’t take this slight well. They follow him into the shop to have words, and the barber’s feeble attempts to calm things fail miserably. This is the moment where we see just how ruthless The Stranger is compared to The Man With No Name, who at least would’ve talked with these men before gunning them down. The Stranger has no time for that, though. Before they can so much as touch their guns, he lays them out cold and dead with three well placed shots, one of which lands right between the eyes of their leader.

This incident, as well as the following disgraceful interaction he has with a foul mouthed local woman whom we eventually learn is basically the town slattern, fully willing to sleep around with whatever man of influence can best benefit her at the time, paints for us a pretty foul picture of The Stranger from the outset. However, High Plains Drifter soon starts to provide us with a far more nuanced picture of not just The Stranger, but the citizens of Lago as well.

Our first hints of more nuanced view are shown shortly after the townsfolk meet to discuss the major problem that The Stranger’s arrival has made for them. As it happens, the trio of brutes he killed were hired on by the town to help protect their gold mining interests, and they weren’t the first set of goons to be hired for the job. It turns out that the mining operation turned to an even more ruthless band of thugs some time ago, Stacey Bridges and his cousins, Dan and Cole Carlin, to protect their interests and profits. However, Stacey and his cousins soon found themselves slapped with iron bracelets and sent off to the county prison for a few years after they were caught stealing a gold ingot that was left on the desk the mining director’s office. Why was a solid gold ingot just left sitting out like that? The Stranger asks as much himself when the town’s corpulent and cowardly Sheriff approaches him to try and hire him on for protection, a job he repeatedly refuses until he’s promised anything he wants.

Thus begins The Stranger’s abuse of the authority he’s been granted. This is when we really start to get a sense that he doesn’t just feel indifferent about this town, but actively seems to dislike it. He has no qualms about taking full advantage of the townsfolk, claiming so many of their finest goods for himself or requisitioning them in the name of the town’s defense that it starts to drive a rift amongst the people. However, this is also when we start to see more of the nuances of the different players in this story, The Stranger included.

The first instance of this comes when he’s at the general store with the Sheriff. He’s gathering supplies and goods that he’s going to need not only for his own journey when he leaves town, but for use in his plan for the town’s defense. As this is happening, we see an elderly Native and his two grandchildren perusing the shopkeeper’s goods. The shopkeeper snaps harshly at the old man as he’s looking at the blankets, telling him to keep his hands off his goods unless he’s buying and referring to them as savages. In response, The Stranger walks over and hands his grandchildren each a full jar of hard candies from the nearby shelf, then a stack of four blankets to the grandfather. The grandfather protests, afraid of being attacked by the shopkeeper or Sheriff, but The Stranger insists it’s alright and gives a pointed look to both men, who readily agree with him.

The second instance we see is when he shows sympathy to the town’s runt, a dwarf named Mordecai. Mordecai is shown to be used as a lackey for many people in town. He’s verbally and physically abused and the town’s business owners force him to do various odd jobs for them. However, when The Stranger offers a round of whiskeys and beers for the townsfolk that night, Mordecai included and much to the chagrin of the saloon owner when he finds out it’s all free on the Sheriff’s orders, he decides to reward Mordecai with a little something more. How? By pinning the Sheriff’s badge to his chest, popping the Mayor’s hat on his head, and declaring there and then that Mordecai is now Lago’s new sheriff and mayor, much to the little man’s elation. By this point, the people in town are smart enough to realize this isn’t a joke. The Stranger is completely serious about this declaration, and henceforth Mordecai takes on these roles, if only in name.

The nuances in Lago only continue to grow as we not only see that The Stranger has an apparent soft spot for those who are mistreated by the town’s citizens, but that some of its citizenry aren’t nearly so just and fair minded as they tried to appear. Indeed, as The Stranger is planning the town’s defense and begins to take more and more from its citizens in the process, we see the rifts in the community start to appear, particularly amongst its leadership. This comes to a head when he demands the rooms in the inn be emptied so that, save the innkeeper and his wife, The Stranger can sleep in the building alone. As the eight living in the inn pour out into the night, complaining all the while, he’s approached by the town priest who insists what he’s doing is inhuman. The Stranger counters by insisting that if all these people are his brothers and sisters under God as he suggests, then he should be able to make room for them in his own house. The priest begrudgingly agrees, revealing his hypocrisy by informing the people they’ll be able to find rooms in the homes of the citizens, but at the same charge as the nicer rooms at the inn.

Tensions continue to mount and eventually some of the townsfolk have had enough. One of the leaders, working with the town harlot in order to lure The Stranger into a false sense of security, attempts to kill The Stranger in his sleep. He fails miserably, getting himself horribly wounded and the three men who joined him killed.

All of this is happening over the backdrop of two major events. The first of these is obvious, the coming of Stacy and his cousins. The second is less clear at the start, but is made more concrete as the story progresses. Some years prior, while Stacy and his cousins were still working for the Lago Mining Company, they beat the town Marshal to death with bullwhips. We see this incident in flashback a couple times in the movie, and each time we get a little more information as to exactly what happened. Ultimately, thanks to an argument between the innkeeper and his wife, we learn that the Marshal discovered that the mine had been illegally dug on government property. The innkeeper insists this was accidental, but accidental or not, Marshal Jim Duncan was an honest man and planned to report what happened to the proper authorities. That honesty resulted in his death, with most of the town refusing to help him even as he begged them to.

As Jim Duncan lay bleeding in the dirt in front of the inn, he breathes out his last words: “Damn you. Damn you all to Hell!”

After this revelation, the movie’s tone begins to shift. We soon see the results of The Stranger’s defense plan. Every structure in Lago has been painted blood red, and The Stranger himself has painted a new name over the signpost at Lago’s entrance. Long picnic tables have been set out with checkered tablecloths, all red and white, and a veritable feast of the town’s supplies laid out upon it. Those not involved in the defense are instructed to sit there and wait. Those who are involved get on their rooftop postings with their shotguns and rifles and wait for Stacey and the Carlin brothers.

Their defense fails miserably. The townsfolk are terrible shots, and even if they weren’t they’re too terrified to act. They panic and flee and the thugs run roughshod over them, capturing them in the saloon after Stacy guns down the mining company owner. And where’s The Stranger in all of this? Gone. He rode out of town before they arrived. Now it’s the dead of night, and half the town is burning while the thugs threaten, abuse, and rob the survivors.

Then a sound comes from out in the darkness. One of the Carlin boys approaches the saloon entrance to investigate, then gets yanked out the front door by a bullwhip that’s lashed around his neck. Inside, his brother and cousin are frozen with uncertainty as they hear the whip crack over and over, backed by his screaming. Then, once he’s gone silent, the bloodied whip is tossed inside and the thugs and townsfolk alike hurry out.

What ensues next feels almost like a slasher movie as The Stranger surprises the second Carlin, snaring another whip around his throat from hiding and leaving him to hang until he dies. Then he stalks Stacy through the darkness, only revealing himself by stepping in front of one of the burning buildings once he’s thoroughly stricken fear into the man. The scene looks like it takes place in Hell, appropriate considering that’s the very name The Stranger painted on the town’s sign. Finally he guns the thug down, leaving the question of who he is unanswered.

Only one more life is taken after that, the innkeeper’s. After the thugs are dead, he tries to kill The Stranger by sniping him from hiding with a rifle. He fails, gunned down by Mordecai, who’s one of only two people hinted to know who The Stranger may actually be. The other is the innkeeper’s wife, Sarah Belding, the only person who thought to try and save Marshal Duncan from Stacy and the Carlin boys. The movie then closes out with Sarah preparing to leave Lago the next morning as The Stranger rides off. He passes Mordecai along the way, who’s carving something into a new headstone:

Marshal Jim Duncan
Rest In Peace

Not unlike Predator, which would come over a decade later, High Plains Drifter is one of those films that manages to masterfully work two completely different kinds of movies into one. For most of its runtime, it’s a gritty Western drama with a fair amount of action. But for those climactic scenes, it toes the lines of a horror movie as it showcases The Stranger stalking his way through the hellish red painted and half burning town of Lago like some kind of classic slasher movie villain. However, where a slasher villain would spend its time ripping through horny teens, (or space truckers if you’re Alien and special forces if it’s the aforementioned Predator) The Stranger instead comes across as a spirit of vengeful justice, taking the lives of the men who ruthlessly murdered Marshal Duncan, and the livelihoods of the people who just stood by and did nothing while hiding behind the pretense of being decent and goodly folks.

I dare say that High Plains Drifter is one of the most surprising and eerie Westerns I’ve ever seen, and I can’t think of a more perfect point of discussion for my first Macabre Monday post.

But what about yourselves? Have you seen High Plains Drifter yet? I certainly hope so by this point, given all the spoilers. If so, what are your thoughts on the film, or what are some other stories you’ve seen that surprised you with unexpected horror elements? Let me know in the comments, my macabre companions! I look forward to your thoughts.

~The Man Behind the Screen

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