Weird West
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
Weird West is used to describe a combination of the Western with another genre, usually horror, occult, or fantasy. It was coined to describe the Deadlands role-playing game, and the specific phrase "Weird West" is trademarked by Pinnacle Entertainment Group. However, the weird Western has earlier roots and the phrase is now used more widely to describe the setting of such tales.
DC's Weird Western Tales appeared in the early 1970s and the weird Western was further popularised by Joe R. Lansdale who "is best known for his tales of the 'weird west,' a genre mixing splatterpunk with alternate history Western almost entirely defined by the author in the early nineties. His work reads a little like the sort of folklore in which Mark Twain dabbled (or the gothic in which Flannery O'Connor was involved), but with zombies and gore."
Examples of these cross-genres include Deadlands (Western/horror), The Wild Wild West and its later film adaptation (Western/steampunk), Jonah Hex (Western/superhero), Firefly (Western/space opera), BraveStarr (Western/science fiction) and many others.
See also
- Cross-genre, of which Weird West is a key example
- List of steampunk works, as a number of the examples veer into this area
- Science fiction Western, a Weird West sub-genre with science-fiction themes in an Old West setting
- Space Western, the application of Western themes to a science-fiction frontier setting which has some crossover with the Weird West genre
- Western genre in other media
