The Burrowers: Monstrosity

Monster movies are about as classic as horror films can get - vampires, zombies, werewolves, mummies, stranger, squishier things than those, it’s one of the most straightforward propositions there is. It’s the threat and fear of the Other, the thing that is not like you or me. And sure, sometimes you’ll get a film that offers up the idea that we’re the real monsters, but when it comes down to it, monsters are largely defined by their difference from us, the ways in which they’re something we aren’t.

The Burrowers is a bleak and unsparing story about monsters, whatever form they take.

It’s 1879, in the Dakota Territories of the still-growing, still-expanding United States, and Fergus Coffey, an immigrant from Ireland, is sweet on a young woman named Maryanne Stewart. She and her family are settlers in the Dakotas, one of a scattered group of homesteads in what was (and arguably still is) Indian territory not that long ago. It’s a tenuous existence in that respect, but it’s one Fergus aims to be part of, courting Maryanne with an heirloom brooch, one of his last reminders of the home he left behind. He rehearses the speech he plans to give to Maryanne’s father, halting and tentative. Nevertheless, he girds himself for the task and rides out to the Stewart’s claim...

...only to find the aftermath of an attack. Two dead, others missing. Naturally, the assumption is that it’s the work of Indians. It could be Ute, could be Sioux. They’ve chased a lot of tribes off their land, a lot of Indians have died. So Fergus starts putting together a posse to find them - himself, John Clay, William Parcher, and young Dobie Spacks. Clay knows the land, and Parcher knows Indians. He’s killed his share, but he’s also learned as much of their languages as he can, and he knows who’s friendly and who’s hostile. Dobie’s the young son of a woman Parcher’s courting, and he sort of insisted on coming, much to his mother’s dismay. They’re escorted by a detachment of soldiers garrisoned in the area against Indian attacks, lead by Henry Victor. Victor is a vain, strutting, preening little man, prone to cruelty, who it becomes clear is just looking for an excuse to torture and kill more Indians. He’s less interested in who might have done it than where the closest reservation is. And so he misses things that Clay and Parcher notice. Like how the two dead settlers haven’t bled out as much as they should have. How their wounds don’ t look like they came from Indian weapons.

Like the mysterious holes in the ground all around the settlement, as if something - several somethings - dug their way up to the surface.

The story itself is pretty straightforward. A bunch of settlers go missing, and a search party made up of various types - the inexperienced one with a personal stake, the seasoned Indian hunter, the one who actually knows the land, the one who insists on going out of a sense of duty - rides off into dangerous territory on a rescue mission. It’s the story of a journey that goes ever deeper into dangerous territory, and how the hostile environment, the things stalking them, and their own frailties become their undoing. In that sense, it's not that dissimilar from Bone Tomahawk, although it's less clumsy in how it navigates the relationship between the white protagonists and Native Americans. Where that film made its antagonists human and then had to go very much out of its way to make it clear that no, these are not Native Americans, these are something separate, and it was more awkward than anything else, here the monsters are not at all human or anything close to it. Everyone in this film - Native American and white alike - is presented as a human being, flaws and all. People like Clay and Parcher have done bad things in the name of keeping settlers safe, but they acknowledge and respect the humanity of the Native Americans they encounter, and don’t seem to relish or celebrate the things they’ve done. Even Victor, the most two-dimensional character, is immediately recognizable as the kind of bully who desperately craves respect that he’ll never get, no matter how much he postures or how many people he hurts. It’s not exactly a character study, but it's very much about the characters, the things they've done and will do, the ways they come together and the ways they turn on each other. You get a pretty good sense of who everyone is through the dialogue, their actions and reactions, striking a nice balance between showing and telling.

And it’s a well-executed production. Horror Westerns are hard to pull off, and this one does a pretty good job of selling the setting. The dialogue feels right for the time without being overly mannered or affected, and it doesn't lapse into anachronism. The cinematography emphasizes the wide-open plains of the Dakotas in traditional fashion, with lots of sprawling landscapes and sunsets and shadowy camps lit by a single fire. The film has enough of a budget there that the locations and costuming all feel convincing as well, and the acting is low-key and understated for the most part (again, the character of Victor skirts the line a little here, but even that sort of works as the sort of affectation you’d expect from someone so insecure). At no point while I was watching this did I ever feel pulled out of the story by something that shouldn’t have been there or by something someone said. It’s a monster film, and this is always a tricky proposition because it’s very easy to show too much and pull people out of the story, but the practical effects generally work well - they’re a little ropey in a couple of places, but nothing approaching distracting. The result is a slow, relentless burn, as the protagonists ride deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness, losing more of themselves along the way.

And at every level it's about monsters and what is monstrous. Parcher starts off kind of unsympathetic, as he’s telling Dobie about three Indians he hung from a tree, but who reveals himself to be more sympathetic as time goes on. Victor is pretty much the embodiment of the white man's cruelty, nothing more than an intemperate, callous bully whose power resides entirely in his troops and his guns. The white man has been monstrous to the natives of this territory, and while some like Parcher understand them as people and seem cognizant of what they’ve done, others like Victor do not. Who is predator and who is prey swaps back and forth across the length of the film, illustrating a cycle of violence. The whites come and kill what lives here, and their callous intrusion leads to even more suffering for everyone. In the end, nothing is learned and the monstrosity continues, passed along from once source to another.

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