Bone Tomahawk Review (Film 2015) The Archives
In a frontier town in the old west, a criminal drifter comes into town and promptly gets shot in the knee and arrested. By morning, the criminal, the deputy sheriff, and the doctor who spent the night in the jail are missing. The only clue is an arrow made from a human bone. Now the sheriff, the deputy sheriff, a town official, and the doctor’s disabled husband must journey five days into the desert to recover the missing citizens from a tribe of non-verbal cannibals preying on settlers.
Bone Tomahawk is a horror/western that actually embraces the tropes of the western genre. All too often, this kind of film winks at the audience too much to convince us it’s really a horror film. Bone Tomahawk has no reason to wink. Once you see the opening sequence of murders go from bad to worse, you know you’re dealing with horror.
The murderous tribe is treated as the other. It’s a bit of a problematic portrayal because it rings a bit too true to the American history of treating Native Americans as subhuman savages. The film attempts to deal with this early on by having a Native citizen of the town explain the cultural history of the tribe in the valley.
Even he doesn’t consider them actually human. While slightly more tolerable from a Native American voice, the film still embraces the Manifest Destiny/we’re the only people worthy of this land racist ideology of American history. The sheriff and his men talk openly about their intent to murder any non-white person they see in the name of saving their own kind from murderous savages.
The easy way around this would have been to clearly declare the cannibals as literal, rather than figurative, monsters in the story. The opening sequence suggests this. The dark, shadowy figure that attacks the criminal’s partner in the burial ground does not appear human. He screeches in near-inaudible whistle tones and stands tall over the ne’er-do-wells he attacks. The story is easier to stomach if you just imagine the isolated cannibal tribe is literally a different species (and therefore not cannibals) than ignore their establishment as an immoral group of humans. I wish that was the actual text of the film, but it is not. They are cruel people, sure, but the blatant mistreatment of anyone who isn’t white throughout the story is tough to swallow.
If you can set aside the racism (and that’s a big if for many people), Bone Tomahawk is really well crafted. The characterization comes to life through a combination of excellent acting, strong costume design, and beautiful props. The social class and attitude of the sheriff (Kurt Russell), deputy sheriff (Richard Jenkins), rich and experienced militia man Brooder (Matthew Fox), and the doctor’s husband (Patrick Wilson) are immediately established with the choice of riding outfits and quality of gear at their disposal.
Brooder rides on a gorgeous white stallion in crisp white and cream clothing, carrying the finest leather satchel and a glinting telescope from Germany. Compare that to the deputy sheriff’s ill-fitting clothing, brown horse with a missing shoe, and telescope beat up from years of use. One man clearly doesn’t have to work anymore; the other will struggle every day of his life to survive.
Then we get to the makeup and costume design of the tribe. There’s a reason the inhuman monster reading is palatable, if not literally presented in the film. These cannibals are covered in a death pallor of gray dust. Their weapons are all sharpened from human bones. Their faces are are altered with the use of animal tusks, fangs, and horns to establish their power structure. They also all have a grotesque addition to their throats that reveals the true nature of their communication system.
It’s incredibly strong monster design. It appears so otherworldly that the extreme violence they inflict upon their victims is simultaneously more shocking and more watchable. They are visually so far removed from what you expect of the problematic tropes of Native American characters on film that they might as well be rubber-masked monsters from kaijū film.
Bone Tomahawk is one of the more memorable and unpredictable horror films to come out in a long time. The skillful use of the Western genre creates essentially an alien world for this kind of film. The well-documented landscapes of the American west have the same effect as the darkened roads of Dracula and the bright exoticism of Creature from the Black Lagoon, only in shades of tan. Everything builds up to one of the most disturbing final acts of any horror film ever made.
