Tag Archives: High Plains Drifter

Ghosts of the Frontier: Vengeance and Redemption in Eastwood’s Twin Westerns

Posted on by Arleigh

“It’s what people know about themselves inside that makes ’em afraid.” — The Stranger

Mythic Outsiders and the Shape of the Stranger

Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider both revolve around the arrival of a mysterious outsider whose presence destabilizes and reconfigures a frontier community already burdened by moral pressure, economic vulnerability, or buried violence. In High Plains Drifter, the Stranger arrives with the weight of something closer to metaphysical judgment than human intention. He is introduced not as a conventional protagonist but as an unsettling disruption of reality itself, a figure who seems to exist slightly outside the normal rules governing cause and consequence. His relationship to the town of Lago is immediately adversarial, but not in a personal sense—it is structural, almost cosmic, as though he is less reacting to the town than fulfilling a prewritten moral outcome.

By contrast, Pale Rider preserves the same narrative skeleton but shifts the emotional and moral emphasis toward intervention rather than judgment. The Preacher still carries ambiguity—his scars, his sudden appearance, and his almost supernatural timing all suggest something beyond ordinary human agency—but his role is fundamentally protective. He enters a world defined by industrial pressure and economic coercion rather than buried collective sin, and his presence functions as a counterweight to imbalance rather than an execution of moral sentence. The result is that both films feel like variations of the same mythic story, but one is written as condemnation while the other reads as reluctant guardianship.

Old Testament Retribution vs. Folkloric Myth

One of the most revealing ways to distinguish the two films is through their mythic grammar. High Plains Drifter reads like an Old Testament narrative of retribution, where morality is absolute, guilt is inherited collectively, and punishment is not only justified but structurally inevitable. The Stranger operates like a figure of divine wrath, not because he explicitly claims divine authority, but because the world of the film behaves as though such authority is implicit. Lago is not a community undergoing moral testing; it is a community already judged. Every act the Stranger commits feels like the unfolding of a sentence that predates his arrival. Violence in this framework is not expressive or emotional—it is procedural, almost liturgical, as though the town is being dismantled according to a moral code that does not permit negotiation.

The Old Testament quality of High Plains Drifter is also evident in its treatment of time and consequence. The past is not past—it is active, invasive, and inescapable. The town’s buried crime against its former marshal is not simply a backstory element; it functions as a theological stain that structures everything that follows. The Stranger does not introduce justice into the world; he reveals that justice was already waiting, dormant and inevitable.

Pale Rider, by contrast, operates within a folkloric mode that feels less doctrinal and more narrative in the oral-tradition sense. The Preacher is not a judge delivering sentence but a figure who appears within a story because the story requires balance. Folklore does not insist on moral finality in the same way scripture does; instead, it preserves ambiguity, repetition, and interpretive openness. The Preacher’s identity remains unresolved not because the film withholds information, but because resolution itself is not the point. He resembles figures from frontier legend—wandering spirits, unnamed avengers, or protective ghosts whose purpose is understood only through their effects on a community rather than through explicit explanation.

Where High Plains Drifter insists on inevitability, Pale Rider allows for contingency. The Preacher arrives in response to suffering rather than in fulfillment of punishment. His presence suggests that moral intervention is episodic rather than absolute, something that occurs when imbalance becomes intolerable rather than something decreed in advance. The result is a world that feels open-ended rather than sealed.

Moral Worlds: Guilt Versus Vulnerability

The moral architecture of each film is constructed through the condition of its community. In High Plains Drifter, Lago is defined by collective guilt so pervasive that it erases meaningful individuality. The townspeople are not simply flawed characters; they are components of a shared moral collapse. Their original crime—the betrayal and murder of their marshal—functions as the foundation of their identity. The Stranger’s arrival does not introduce new moral tension; it activates an existing one that has been suppressed but never resolved. The town’s psychology is therefore circular: guilt produces fear, fear produces complicity, and complicity guarantees punishment.

This circularity is what gives High Plains Drifter its claustrophobic quality. There is no outside moral perspective capable of altering the town’s fate. Even resistance or survival strategies feel complicit in the same moral structure. The town is effectively trapped inside its own ethical architecture.

In Pale Rider, however, the mining community is framed through vulnerability rather than guilt. These characters are not haunted by a collective sin but threatened by external forces—specifically Coy LaHood’s industrial expansion, which seeks to displace them through economic pressure and intimidation. The moral stakes are therefore asymmetrical: a powerful industrial entity versus a fragile group of independent miners. This reframing is crucial because it transforms the Preacher’s role from agent of punishment to agent of protection. He does not expose corruption within the miners; he resists corruption directed toward them.

Tone and Philosophical Direction

The tonal difference between the films reflects Eastwood’s evolving relationship with the Western mythos. High Plains Drifter is austere, surreal, and deliberately disorienting. The town of Lago feels less like a historical location than a moral construct, a space designed to contain judgment. The visual and narrative isolation of the town reinforces its status as a closed system, one in which moral consequence operates without interference from broader social or geographic context. The result is a film that feels almost metaphysical in its severity, as though it is staging a moral experiment rather than telling a grounded story.

Violence in this context becomes an instrument of revelation. Each act performed by the Stranger peels back layers of denial and self-deception, leaving only the raw structure of guilt beneath. The tone is not merely dark—it is stripping, reductive, and final.

Pale Rider, while still restrained and often somber, introduces a more grounded emotional texture. The mining settlement feels materially real, shaped by labor, scarcity, and interpersonal bonds. This grounding prevents the film from collapsing into abstraction. Even when supernatural ambiguity is present, it is embedded within a world that feels historically and physically tangible. This creates a tonal tension between myth and realism that softens the absolutism found in High Plains Drifter. Instead of moral vacuum, Pale Rider offers moral friction.

The Outsider as Moral Force

Eastwood’s performances in both films embody the evolution of the outsider archetype. In High Plains Drifter, the Stranger is almost entirely detached from human relatability. His silence is not contemplative but destabilizing, creating unease in every interaction. He functions like a moral solvent, dissolving social bonds and exposing hidden structures of guilt. There is no suggestion that he belongs to the world he enters; instead, he appears to impose a structure upon it.

In Pale Rider, the Preacher retains the same controlled economy of expression, but his presence is tempered by moments of relational meaning. His connection to the miners, particularly the young girl whose prayer summons him, introduces a reciprocal dimension absent from High Plains Drifter. He is not simply an external force acting upon the world; he is a figure whose arrival is framed as response. This responsiveness is what aligns him more closely with folkloric tradition, where characters are defined not by origin but by function within a narrative ecosystem.

Violence as Judgment vs. Necessity

Violence in High Plains Drifter operates as moral inevitability. It is structured, ritualized, and unavoidably recursive. Each act feels like the continuation of a moral sequence already underway, as though the Stranger is simply advancing toward a predetermined conclusion. The emotional effect is one of inevitability without catharsis.

In Pale Rider, violence is repositioned as necessity rather than inevitability. It emerges only when economic exploitation and coercion leave no viable alternatives. This reframing is subtle but significant: violence becomes situational rather than cosmic. The Preacher does not embody judgment; he responds to imbalance. As a result, even the film’s climactic confrontations carry a different emotional charge—they feel like interruptions in injustice rather than fulfillments of destiny.

Supporting Communities and Narrative Focus

Both films maintain a strong central focus on Eastwood’s outsider, which inevitably limits the depth of supporting character development. However, the implications of this limitation differ between them. In High Plains Drifter, the flattening of the townspeople reinforces the idea of collective moral identity. Individual psychology is irrelevant because the town functions as a single ethical organism. The lack of distinction between characters serves the film’s allegorical purpose.

In Pale Rider, the miners are more individualized in performance even if not fully developed in script. Actors such as Michael Moriarty and Carrie Snodgress bring emotional specificity that suggests lives extending beyond the frame. This helps ground the film’s mythic structure in human stakes, preventing it from becoming purely symbolic. Even if the characters are archetypal, they are not abstract.

Visual Mythmaking

Cinematographically, the two films articulate their mythic identities through environment. High Plains Drifter constructs a space that feels artificially isolated, as though removed from ordinary geography and placed into a moral void. The town becomes a sealed chamber in which ethical consequences unfold without external interference. This abstraction reinforces its Old Testament quality: a world governed by decree.

Pale Rider, shot by Bruce Surtees, leans into environmental tactility. The forests, mountains, and mining encampments feel embedded in a larger natural system. This grounding creates a sense of narrative openness. Rather than existing as a moral stage, the landscape feels like a lived world in which myth temporarily emerges before receding again into ordinary life. This is essential to its folkloric tone.

Conclusion: Two Mythic Languages of the Western

Ultimately, High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider function as two distinct mythic languages within Clint Eastwood’s evolving critique of the Western. One articulates itself through Old Testament logic—absolute judgment, collective guilt, and irreversible consequence. The other speaks in folkloric terms—episodic intervention, narrative ambiguity, and moral imbalance temporarily corrected rather than permanently resolved. Together, they form a sustained meditation on the Western outsider as both executioner and legend: one who arrives to complete a sentence already written, and another who arrives like a story that briefly becomes real before fading back into myth.

The Western Wound: Horror, History, and the Haunting of Frontier Mythology

Posted on by Arleigh

“You want to shoot me, go ahead. It won’t matter. I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe.” — The Stranger

The Western Wound: Horror, History, and the Haunting of Frontier Mythology

Horror profoundly shapes, distorts, and reframes the American Western, complicating familiar narratives of lawmen and outlaws with the uncanny specter of trauma, dread, and evil. Few films demonstrate this transformation more powerfully than Ravenous (1999), Bone Tomahawk (2015), and High Plains Drifter (1973). These three Westerns push beyond genre conventions, leveraging horror’s capacity to unsettle, destabilize, and haunt—creating experiences that are as philosophically provocative as they are viscerally unsettling. Rather than merely incorporating horror aesthetics into a Western setting, each film employs horror as a core thematic device to interrogate violence, community, morality, and the dark legacies of frontier expansion.

The Haunted Frontier: Atmosphere and the Specter of Evil

High Plains Drifter’s isolation in the arid Nevada desert is more than a physical setting; it externalizes the moral barrenness and guilt festering within the town of Lago. The oscillation between relentless sunlight and dense fog creates a hallucinatory space where natural laws are suspended, and supernatural retribution manifests. Central water imagery—the fog rolling off the lake, the lake itself—serves as a liminal zone, symbolizing the boundary between life and death, past and present, justice and vengeance. The Stranger’s spectral emergence from the desert heat haze hints at his otherworldly nature, turning the town’s landscape into a haunted battleground where redemption is elusive and suffering endemic.

Ravenous’s setting in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains during the Mexican-American War imbues its horror with claustrophobic dread. Fort Spencer’s remoteness in the face of towering, hostile peaks and unrelenting winter transforms the natural environment into a gothic prison. This wilderness is both physical and psychological, oppressive in its vastness and merciless in its cold. The film uses this setting to amplify the existential terror wrought by cannibalism, suggesting an inescapable cycle of consumption where survival becomes monstrous. Deep shadows, filtered natural lighting, and long quiet scenes evoke dread as much as extreme violence.

In Bone Tomahawk, the stark, sunbaked deserts and towering rock formations of the American Southwest form an ominous landscape embodying ancient and unknowable horror. The frontier town is a fragile outpost at civilization’s edge, surrounded by a wild, menacing wilderness. The deep canyons serve as metaphorical gateways to past atrocities, echoing the silent histories of indigenous trauma and colonial violence. The oppressive silence and vastness underscore humanity’s diminutiveness and vulnerability, while the jagged terrain symbolizes the harshness of both nature and history’s brutal forces.

Monstrous Transformation: The Horror Within

The Stranger in High Plains Drifter manifests the blurring boundaries between justice and vengeance, heroism and monstrosity. His actions—including an unsettling rape scene—force a confrontation with the darkest aspects of human nature, showing how violence corrupts even those who claim righteousness. His ghostly status and ruthless methodology suggest he is a representation of collective guilt made tangible, punishing the town’s sins with otherworldly finality. The film invites viewers to question whether vengeance restores balance or merely perpetuates horror.

In Ravenous, cannibalism literalizes the primal urge to consume not only flesh but identity and sanity, transforming survivors into monsters. The character Ives, charismatic and terrifying, embodies this transformation, seducing others into a vortical descent of brutality. The film’s psychological horror arises from the contagion of hunger and madness, the breakdown of social and moral order amid desolation. It probes existential questions about survival, morality, and the dissolution of self.

Bone Tomahawk depicts transformation through the confrontation with an ancient, savage tribe whose brutality transcends ordinary human evil. The characters’ exposure to this primordial terror strips away civilized facades, forcing characters and viewers to acknowledge the latent barbarity within humanity. The film’s horror is both external—in the violent acts of the tribe—and internal—in the psychological unravelling of the rescue party. This duality highlights the wilderness as both physical terrain and psychic landscape of primal fear.

The Community and the Failures of Civilization

The communal failure in High Plains Drifter reveals how collective cowardice and betrayal corrupt society. Lago’s townsfolk enable the marshal’s murder and face the Stranger’s supernatural justice as a consequence. Their moral bankruptcy transforms the town into a cursed locus of horror, symbolizing how collective sin corrupts the social fabric and invites ruin.

Ravenous portrays community breakdown within the remote outpost, where isolation breeds paranoia, selfishness, and violence. The collapse of trust and order mirrors the broader failure of frontier society to contain human baseness under extreme conditions, suggesting society itself is a fragile construct vulnerable to collapse.

In Bone Tomahawk, the fragile rescue party embodies the precariousness of social cohesion facing profound evil. Their doomed mission stresses how thin the veneer of civilization is, shattering under pressure from ancient horrors. The film critiques assumptions of order and control, emphasizing the ease with which human society can crumble.

Violence, Justice, and the Ethical Horror

Violence in High Plains Drifter is unending, spectral, and morally ambiguous. The Stranger’s vengeance refuses neat closure, illustrating cycles of violence that leave deeper scars rather than justice. The film redefines violent retribution as torment, destabilizing conventional heroic narratives.

Ravenous entwines violence with survival horror and existential dread. The ritualistic cannibalism is a metaphor for moral and spiritual corrosion, forcing characters and audiences to face the horrors wrought by the primal fight for survival at civilization’s edge.

Bone Tomahawk presents violence as slow, ritualistic, and ancient—an elemental force indifferent to human ethics. Its stark, realistic depiction immerses viewers in fear and helplessness, rejecting conventional catharsis and highlighting the terror of primal brutality.

Subtext and Symbolism: Horror as the Depths of Humanity

High Plains Drifter blends ghostly and surreal imagery to explore unresolved sin and cultural guilt. The Stranger is both avenger and specter of collective trauma, with symbolic elements—such as the red-painted town and unmarked graves—that deepen the meditation on punishment and desolation.

Ravenous uses cannibalism and wilderness as symbols of consumption and destruction intrinsic to frontier expansion. Horror here reflects existential struggles with survival, cultural annihilation, and moral ambiguity, set against an environment of engulfing nature and history.

Bone Tomahawk evokes frontier horror as a metaphor for repressed histories and cultural erasure. The savage tribe symbolizes ancestral trauma, while the desolate landscapes underscore the lingering presence of buried horrors that haunt the Western imagination.

The Western Genre as a Wound Haunted by Horror

Ravenous, Bone Tomahawk, and High Plains Drifter deepen the Western genre’s reckoning with violence, morality, and civilization’s fragility. Ravenous allegorizes hunger and expansion’s destructive appetite through cannibalism, revealing survival’s costs to identity and culture. Bone Tomahawk exposes historical violence and trauma encoded in landscape and myth, demonstrating Western justice’s limits. High Plains Drifter dramatizes unresolved guilt and vengeance through spectral retribution, challenging sanitized Western heroism.

The films’ central horrors—the Stranger’s merciless vengeance, the cannibal’s transformative hunger, and the doomed rescue mission into darkness—serve as meditations on violence, communal complicity, and the absence of redemption. They unmask the American West and America itself as terrains haunted by deep, unresolved sins and moral ambiguity. In marrying supernatural and psychological horror, these films offer a complex, layered critique of frontier myth, turning the Western from a tale of conquest into a haunted narrative of trauma, survival, and moral reckoning.

Supernatural vs Psychological Readings

High Plains Drifter uniquely embodies ambiguity between supernatural revenge and psychological torment. The Stranger’s ghostlike qualities and resurrection to avenge his murder firmly anchor a supernatural interpretation. His eerie manifestations—such as the bullwhip’s sound triggering vivid nightmares and his mysterious appearance from the desert heat—signal a spectral force beyond human comprehension. Yet, on a psychological level, the Stranger can be viewed as the materialization of the town’s collective guilt and suppressed trauma. This duality enriches the narrative, allowing viewers to interpret the horror as either literal supernatural vengeance or a psycho-spiritual reckoning of internal moral collapse.

Ravenous blurs supernatural and psychological horror by mixing the tangible terror of cannibalism with metaphysical dread. The figure of Ives carries almost mythic qualities—his charismatic yet monstrous presence suggests an otherworldly evil, a contagion consuming the souls of men. The mountain wilderness functions as a liminal space transcending reality, where madness and primal urges surface. This ambiguity invites readings of the horror as both external supernatural curse and internal psychological disintegration, reflecting survival’s dehumanizing cost amidst isolation and guilt.

Bone Tomahawk grounds itself mostly in realistic terror but invokes mythic supernatural threads through the savage tribe’s almost fantastical menace. Their brutal, ritualized violence carries residues of ancestral curses and primal fears that exceed mere human malevolence. The film explores psychological horror through the characters’ terror and helplessness confronting an unknowable evil, making the wilderness and tribe a metaphor for the abyss of human and historical trauma. Thus, horror emerges as both a tangible threat and a psychological abyss threatening identity and sanity.

This interplay of supernatural and psychological horror amplifies these films’ thematic depth. By refusing to confine horror to one domain, they portray the Western frontier as a space haunted simultaneously by ghosts—whether spiritual, historical, or personal—and inner demons manifesting as guilt, fear, and madness.

Ultimately, horror in these Westerns is not merely a matter of frightening events but a profound engagement with unsettled histories and psyches. This dynamic makes their terror resonate long after the screen fades to black, marking the Western as a genre haunted not only by outlaws and the wilderness but by the specters within us all.

Horror profoundly alters the Western genre’s narrative, revealing it as a cultural wound, a landscape haunted by the ghosts of its own violent history and moral contradictions. By challenging sanitized myths and exposing the fragility beneath civilization’s veneer, Ravenous, Bone Tomahawk, and High Plains Drifter not only frighten but provoke deep reflection on the legacies of violence and the nature of justice itself—capturing the horror at the heart of the American story.

Horror Review: High Plains Drifter (dir. by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Don’t count on me to make you feel safe.” — The Stranger

High Plains Drifter stands as one of the bleakest, most enigmatic entries in Clint Eastwood’s filmography—a Western that bleeds unmistakably into the realms of psychological and supernatural horror. This 1973 film is not just another dusty tale of lone gunfighters and frontier justice. It’s a nightmare set in broad daylight, a morality play whose hero is more monster than man.

Eastwood’s Stranger comes riding into the town of Lago from the shimmering desert, a silhouette both akin to and apart from his famed Man With No Name persona. The townsfolk are desperate, haunted by fear—less afraid of imminent violence, more of the sins they’ve half-buried. This is a place where a lawman was brutally murdered by outlaws while the townspeople looked away, their silence paid for with cowardice and greed. When the Stranger assumes command, he does so with often-gleeful sadism—kicking people out of their hotel rooms, replacing the mayor and sheriff with the dwarf Mordecai, and ordering that the entire town be painted red before putting “Hell” on its welcome sign.

There’s a surface plot: the Stranger is hired to protect Lago from the same three outlaws who once butchered its marshal. But he’s there for far more than that. The story unspools through dreamlike sequences, flashbacks that suggest the Stranger may well be an avenging spirit or a revenant—the dead lawman, spectral and merciless, returned to claim what the townsfolk owe to Hell itself.

The horror here isn’t about jump scares or gothic haunted houses. The supernatural lurks everywhere and yet nowhere. The Stranger moves with the implacable calm—and violence—of a slasher villain, transforming Lago into his personal stage for retribution. His nightmares, full of images of past atrocities, are painted with the same vivid brutality as the daytime violence. Eastwood’s use of silence, the squint of a face, the twitch of a pistol replaces musical cues in amplifying dread. The sound design evokes otherness—a howling wind, footsteps echoing across empty streets—that builds a shadow of terror around the Stranger’s presence.

This violence is hurried and brutal; its sexual politics unflinching. When the Stranger enacts revenge, he punishes not just the outlaws, but the townsfolk complicit in their crimes. There is little comfort in his sense of justice—the pleasures he takes border on sadistic. The film’s moral ambiguity cuts deeper than most Westerns or horrors: this is not a clear-cut tale of good versus evil, but a brutal reckoning of collective guilt, cowardice, and corruption.

Lago itself acts almost like a town stuck in purgatory—a holding pen between redemption and eternal damnation. The infamous “Welcome to Hell” sign the Stranger paints at the town’s entrance serves as a grim message. It’s no welcome to law and order, but a symbolic beacon to the very outlaws the Stranger is hired to confront, suggesting that Lago is a place where sin festers and punishes itself. The town’s dance with Hell is both literal and metaphorical. The inhabitants aren’t just awaiting judgment; they have invited it in their desperate attempts to hide their cowardice and greed under the guise of civilization.

This notion of Lago as purgatory stands in sharp contrast to other recent horror Westerns, which serve as prime examples of the genre’s thematic spectrum. These films tend to focus on the primal terror of nature barely held at bay by the fragile veneer of civilization the settlers claim. They pit human beings against the ancient, untamed forces of the wilderness—whether monstrous creatures or surreal phenomena—emphasizing that the supposed order and progress of the West remain fragile and constantly threatened. This dynamic symbolizes the uneasy balance between civilization’s reach and nature’s primal power, often revealing how thin and tenuous that barrier truly is.

Among these, Bone Tomahawk and Ravenous stand out as vivid examples. Bone Tomahawk confronts menacing cannibals lurking in the wild, reminding viewers that the West’s order is fragile and under perpetual threat from untamed wilderness. Ravenous uses cannibalism and survival horror as metaphors for nature’s savage predation hidden beneath the polite façade of civilization—nature’s horrors masked but not erased.

By contrast, High Plains Drifter directs its horror inward, exposing the corruption that manifest destiny imposed on settlers themselves. Instead of fearing nature as an external force, the film presents settlers as haunted by their own moral failures and complicity in violence and betrayal. The Stranger’s vengeance is a reckoning with the darkness festering inside the community, a brutal meditation on guilt, collective cowardice, and the price of greed disguised as progress.

Eastwood’s film strips away the mythic promises of the American West as a land of freedom and opportunity, revealing instead the brutal reality of communities locked in complicity, violence masquerading as justice, and the moral rot at the heart of manifest destiny. This moral ambiguity and psychological depth give High Plains Drifter a unique position in the horror Western subgenre, elevating it beyond simple scares to a profound exploration of American cultural myths.

The Stranger is not a traditional hero but a spectral judge, embodying divine or supernatural retribution. His calm yet ruthless punishment exposes the cruelty, cowardice, and malevolence within Lago’s population, meting out a justice that is neither neat nor forgiving. His supernatural aura and sadistic tendencies make him an unforgettable figure of terror and fate.

Visually, the film’s harsh daylight contrasts with the romanticized Western landscapes of earlier films. Instead of shadows hiding evil, blinding light exposes the town’s moral decay. Characters are reduced to symbols of greed, fear, and cruelty, highlighting that the true horror lies within human nature and the failure to uphold justice.

High Plains Drifter operates on multiple levels—a Western, a ghost story, a horror film, and a dark morality play. It is a relentless meditation on justice and punishment and a dismantling of the traditional Western hero myth. Through layered narrative, stark visuals, and Eastwood’s chilling performance, it remains an essential entry in the horror Western canon.

For those seeking a Western that doesn’t just entertain but unsettles and challenges, High Plains Drifter offers an unforgiving descent into darkness. It strips away the comforting myths of the frontier and exposes the raw, rotting core beneath. Unlike other modern horror Westerns such as Bone Tomahawk and Ravenous, which confront external terrors lurking in the wilderness, this film turns its gaze inward—on the moral decay, guilt, and violence festering within the settlers themselves. It’s a brutal, haunting reckoning, and Eastwood’s Stranger is the cold, relentless agent of that reckoning. This is a journey into a hell both literal and psychological, where justice is merciless and safety is a long-forgotten promise.​

Film Review: High Plains Drifter (dir by Clint Eastwood)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1973’s High Plans Drifter, Clint Eastwood plays …. The Stranger.

No, not the Man With No Name.  The Stranger has a name but he chooses not to share it.  That said, when one person says that he doesn’t even know the Stranger’s real name, the Stranger replies, “Yes, you do.”  The Stranger appears to emerge from the heat of the desert, riding into the small mining town of Lago and gunning down the three bullies that the townspeople hired to protect them after the murder of their town marshal.  With no other option, the townspeople accept the Stranger as the town’s new protector.

The Stranger is drawn to the town and the townspeople but he doesn’t seem to particularly like any of them, with the exception of Mordecai (Billy Curtis), the dwarf that the Stranger appoints as the town’s new sheriff.  The townspeople, the majority of whom are cowardly and motivated by greed, aren’t particularly likable themselves.  The Stranger rules the town like a dictator, kicking everyone out of the hotel so that he can have it for himself and ordering that every building in the town be painted red.  Over the town’s welcome sign, he paints one word: “Hell.”  When the townspeople see how well the Stranger can shoot, they celebrate in the belief that they’ll always be safe.  The Stranger responds by leaving town just as three sadistic outlaws, led by Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis), approach.  The Stranger may be looking for revenge on Bridges but he also seems as if he wants to make the town suffer for its sins as well.

Much as with the case of The Man With No Name, the Stranger is not motivated by kindness or any sort of concern for the safety of the townspeople.  He often shows a cruel-streak when it comes to dealing with the cowardly townspeople.  He doesn’t attack unless he’s attacked first but once you’re on his bad side, he’ll gun you down without a hint of emotion.  When the Stranger sleeps, he is haunted by nightmares of the previous marshal (played by Buddy Van Horn, Clint Eastwood’s stunt double) being murdered by Bridges and his men while the townspeople stood by and did nothing.  We learn that the townspeople, worried that it might be bad for their business interests, didn’t even give the late marshal a decent headstone after his death.  One woman mentions that spirits can’t rest unless they have a proper marker….

Getting the idea?

High Plains Drifter is probably the closest that Eastwood has ever come to making a supernatural horror film.  The Stranger may or may not be a vengeful ghost (the movie leaves that for you to decide) but he turns the small town of Lago into his own personal version of Hell and, when he attacks the men who killed the marshal, he moves with the ruthless determination of a slasher villain.  The scene where Bridges and his men ride into the town is like a filmed nightmare.  This is a dark film, one in which Eastwood’s Stranger is not the hero because he’s particular heroic but just because everyone else in the film is so bad.

This was also Eastwood’s second film as a director (following Play Misty For Me) and also the first of many westerns that Eastwood would direct.  The imagery is often haunting, all the more so because some of the most violent scenes take place in broad daylight.  The scenes where the Stranger seems to materialize out of the desert’s heatwaves perfectly capture the mythology of the old west and its “heroes.”  Eastwood gets good performances out of his ensemble cast and, even more importantly, he shows that Eastwood the director had a perfect understanding of Eastwood the actor.  As the Stranger, Eastwood says more with a snarl or a half-smile than most actors could say with a multi-page monologue.

High Plains Drifter is violent, often disturbing, and ultimately unforgettable.