The Big Picture

The concept of the horror Western, like the vampire Western, brilliantly combines old and new genres, creating a unique aesthetic interplay.

Curse of the Undead
was a joke turned successful horror Western film, mixing Gothic vampire elements with classic Western narrative archetypes.
The film’s eerie atmosphere, stark lighting, and subtle horror elements provide a new and exciting take on the Wild West in a thoughtful way.

In the last few decades, as the conventional Western has subsided in popularity, the genre has become a playground for kooky genre fusions and exercises in style. Besides the more minute modifiers you’ll hear being thrown around like spaghetti Western, anti-Western, neo-Western, post-Western, or acid-Western, you also get broader fusions like the sci-fi Western or the “weird” Western. One of the most enduring of these is the horror Western. These movies are playful exercises in camp just as often as they are genuinely terrifying and have a unique interplay between their aesthetic influences owing to their common ground in representing the tension between old and new. This interplay is especially clear in the even more niche subgenre, the vampire Western, as it’s a combination of two genres that routinely focus on outsider narratives, religious iconography, and the anxieties of the present reflected through those of the past.

When you see something as grungy and radical as Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, it’s easy to assume that it was a complete departure from tradition. However, the vampire Western goes back further than even the first revisionist Westerns, with Edward Dein’s 1959 film Curse of the Undead. A low-budget, 80-minute B-movie, Curse of the Undead remixes various tropes from Gothic vampire tales and small-scale Westerns. Despite its modest budget, the film holds up surprisingly well. It has great pacing, avoiding the stagnation that plagues many B-pictures from the era. It moves between settings rapidly and doesn’t save all of its punches for the end, instead peppering the plot with deaths, tense confrontations, and narrative twists throughout. It uniquely captures its stock old-West-town setting through simple but effective high-contrast lighting but drops the romantics when the characters speak through its lean, sturdy, almost noir-tinged dialogue. From watching Curse of the Undead, it’s easy to see how the vampire Western gained enough momentum to become a formidable subgenre on its own. But perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that the idea for it started out as a joke between a husband and wife.

Curse of the Undead (1959) While a malady is claiming the lives of young women in a Western town, a sinister gunslinger-for-hire Drake Robey is really a vampire, and it’s up to Preacher Dan to save the town and girlfriend Dolores Carter.Release Date May 1, 1959 Director Edward Dein Cast Eric Fleming , Michael Pate , Kathleen Crowley , John Hoyt , Bruce Gordon , Edward Binns , Jimmy Murphy , Helen Kleeb Runtime 79 Minutes Writers Edward Dein , Mildred Dein

The Idea for ‘Curse of the Undead’ Started out as a Joke Between the Writers
The screenplay for Curse of the Undead was penned by the director Edward Dein and his wife, Mildred Dein. The idea started as a gag between the two of them. In the recent DVD/Blu-ray release, film historian Tom Weaver expands on this background. When Universal – the powerhouse studio behind the century’s greatest monster movies – heard the idea and came calling, the joke had to become something more. They were able to bring not only a functional narrative arc but a unique and cohesive style out of this idea. As a result, this horror Western has been able to achieve a sense of real prestige in the decades since, even securing a restoration for Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray release.

Far from the comical satire it was initially conceived as, Curse of the Undead deftly mixes its influences in narrative and form. In doing so, it creates an effective and prescient recapitulation of the violence at the center of most Western narratives. The basic premise is simple and well-tread: A mysterious gunslinger rolls through a small town and gets caught in the middle of a land dispute. On either side of this feud are familiar archetypes. The encroaching baron, a slimeball named Buffer (Bruce Gordon), and his gang of thugs have taken to pushing the townsfolk around any time they want if it promises capital gains. Meanwhile, the de facto paragons of the town’s good denizens are the local preacher Dan (Eric Fleming), and Dr. Carter (John Hoyt) and his family.

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On top of this classic conflict, young women have been contracting a mysterious illness, one that leaves them dead with two puncture wounds in the neck. By the time the story picks up, the town is already tearing itself apart. The doctor goes missing one night and, blaming Buffer, his son Tim (Jimmy Murphy) goes out looking for a fight – one that he loses along with his life. This leaves the principled young preacher and the doctor’s beautiful daughter, Dolores (Kathleen Crowley). The two are romantically linked but divided over what to do. Despite Dan’s protests, Dolores hires a leather-clad gunslinger to kill Buffer.

‘Curse of the Undead’ Approaches Western Self-Critique Like the Revisionist Classics

The gunslinger, a hard-nosed killer named Drake Robey, is played by Michael Pate. While the performances in this are mostly solid, Pate excels past everyone else. He was a veteran of classic Western TV shows, and he captures the perfect balance between the tortured theatrics of classic vampires and the steady-handed coolness of world-weary cowboys. His character also provides a compelling twist on the cowboy antihero. Whereas the morally gray interloper he portends to be would normally find redemption in helping the innocents beset by a greedy and duplicitous land baron, Robey wants nothing more than to extend the cycles of violence that plague this town. Not only that, but with him in town, all violence becomes inevitably gendered, as he sweeps into the chaos to pray on the most vulnerable and overlooked people there: the women. Robey presents an implicit commentary on Western heroes, and despite the goofy premise, Curse of the Undead handles itself with a level of restraint that allows for a sincere critique of the Western genre’s historical faith in violence.

The stark lighting lends the film an oppressive atmosphere, as though even the shadows themselves are reaching out to take the characters. This style, lifted straight from the likes of classic Universal monster pictures like Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), complements Robey’s predation. In one scene, where he first feeds on Dolores, he moves about a moonlit room with the uncanny theatricality of Bela Lugosi. This isn’t toe-curling, scream-inducing horror, but it captures the eerie atmosphere of horror classics. The film also strategically withholds certain information, leaving viewers to connect the dots. When someone goes missing, even though the town’s eyes are on Buffer, we know to look out for Robey. This imbues the film with a foreboding sense of mystery and unease. It’s no scream-a-minute thrill ride, but it takes its horror elements seriously enough to render the Wild West in a new and exciting way.

Robey doesn’t just feed on the blood of young women, he thrives on the violence inherent to America’s westward expansion and industrialization. As with the greatest Westerns, a conflict of material interests functions also as a conflict of principles. By the end of the story, only Dan knows of Robey’s true nature. In a scene shortly before their final confrontation, they engage in a heated argument. Dan’s faith is reflective of his ideals of peace and progress, whereas Robey is a creature of bleak nihilism. The inevitable ending argues that neither of their philosophies may be entirely tenable in the course of America’s origins. The film ends in victory, in keeping with the Western conventions of the time, but it is imbued with the tragedy of a Gothic fable. Curse of the Undead is more than an artifact from film history. The Deins’ film cracked a code with this unlikely genre-fusion. Curse of the Undead may have been the first of its kind, but considering its unique atmosphere and approach to genre self-critique, there’s a reason why it wasn’t the last.

Curse of the Undead is available to watch on Tubi.

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