The Burrowers (2008)

The American frontier, 1861. Two families are attacked, some of them killed, the women kidnapped. Everyone is sure that the deed was done by a group of Sioux from the reservation close by, because killing farmers and kidnapping women as their future wives is what Indians do, right. There's just the small matter of details like the strange, round holes in the vicinity of the farm and the even stranger wounds that killed the farmers - single cuts in their necks - to ignore. A posse consisting of a cavalry troop under the command of a certain Henry Victor (Doug Hutchison) and a few interested private citizens, the experienced John Clay (Clancy Brown) and Will Parcher (William Mapother), as well as Coffey (Karl Geary) who was just about to propose to one of the missing women and Dobie (Galen Hutchinson), the teenage son of the woman Parcher is trying to woo.
The soldiers abduct the first Indian they see and start with the torturing at once. Of course, the poor guy doesn't know much, and without the torturing, he would probably have told them what he knew. The civilians are less than impressed by the way Victor handles the situation, or by the fact that he's obviously a sadistic maniac with a very short fuse. It's not that these aren't violent and hard people, they just don't get off on senseless cruelty like Victor and his men do.
The only thing their captive can tell them is that they are looking for "the burrowers", plainly no Indian tribe anyone has ever heard of. That's no reason for Victor not to want to ride further into the Indian reservation to finally get himself some killing done again. The civilians remain skeptical, even more so after four of Victor's men just disappear while they are on guard duty. For Victor, it's a clear case of desertion. Parcher, Clay and the others don't even bother to tell him of the holes that have appeared around the camp anymore.
Instead, they split from the soldiers and let them go about their business of genocide, while they go and try to find out where following the strange holes will lead them.
Soon after Victor's black cook Callaghan (Sean Patrick Thomas), glad to find a reason to get away from a racist madman like his former boss, has joined them (and no, he's not going to sacrifice his life bravely so that our white heroes can go on), they make a terrible discovery. A girl, paralyzed, conscious and buried alive, bearing the same wound as the dead back home. The man slowly begin to understand that they are not hunting anything human at all.
The Burrowers is a very fine movie, the kind of film that does nearly everything right, marrying the revisionist Western and the horror film so deftly as to make it look easy.
Usually, I try to avoid using words like "gritty", but for once it is the right way to describe a film. From the start, the film strives for the dusty and muddy naturalism, showing the West not necessarily as it was, but very much in a way it really could have been, with all the cruelty and racism this implies. Yet director and writer J.T. Petty mostly (Henry Victor is the exception, and very much the sort of exception you make when you want to make a political point) eschews demonizing his characters as much as glorifying them. Clay and Parcher, for example, are hard men, willing to do most anything to survive, but they aren't cruel, or more violent than is necessary for them. Petty also gets some excellent performances from his actors, some of whom obviously relish the chance to do some real acting this time.
I find it remarkable how well the film fits the basic horror of life on the frontier, where the slightest misunderstanding can lead to the death of someone who just doesn't deserve it, to the even greater horror of the burrowers. As a revisionist Western, it talks openly about the terrors people inflict upon themselves and so needs monsters that are even worse, and made even worse by the way people relate to them.
Besides this, the film is also one of the coolest monster flicks of recent years, utilizing a surprisingly effective mixture of CGI and physical effects. At first, we only get enticing glimpses of the burrowers, which escalate into moments of greater violence and greater visibility, slowly building up to a very grotesque finale.
Speaking of finale, it's been a long time since I have seen a film with an ending that has such a tone of cruel absurdity, which is perfectly fitting for this story.
The Burrowers is a beautiful example of the sort of film I wish more American horror directors would start to make again. A film with adults, about adults, interested in something besides gore without ignoring it completely, intelligent and thoughtful enough without trying to hit the viewer over the head with its own cleverness, very nicely photographed, edited with a sense of craft, but still very much a film inside the genre. Just not one willing to ignore the interesting things one can do within a genre; or, as is the case here, by letting two genres collide.

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