How A Horror-Western Double Feature Kicked Off A Hybrid Genre

There's a moment early in the improbably named 1966 film Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula where the Count (John Carradine), whose actual name is never said aloud, stifles a yawn while riding in a stagecoach. Do vampires yawn? That’s doubtful; more likely it’s just the veteran Carradine, still wearing the same top hat he wore for the role in both House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein more than 20 years earlier, exhibiting his utter boredom with the whole thing.

Half of a double feature that was tailor-made for the drive-in era, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula went out on the same bill six decades ago with the equally silly-sounding Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter. Both were directed by William Beaudine, a journeyman who churned out a reported 178 features in his career, of which these two were the last before he passed. Neither film is any damn good, but both arguably helped plant the seed for one of the most interesting genre hybrids out there: the horror Western, which has yielded entertaining — and sometimes outstanding — titles such as Bone Tomahawk, Ravenous, and Near Dark.

Beaudine reportedly shot both flicks in 16 days, and it shows in their day-for-night visuals, threadbare production values, and mediocre scripts and casts. Carradine reportedly said that Billy the Kid vs. Dracula was the only movie he regretted doing in his nearly 60-year career, which encompassed hundreds of films. His remorse is understandable: his vampire is a bug-eyed old lech who wants to take young, nubile Betty Bentley (Melinda Plowman) as his vampire bride — something to which her fiancé, legendary (and now retired — don’t look for historical accuracy here) outlaw Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney), strenuously objects.

Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter is only marginally better than its counterpart. Outlaw Jesse James (John Lupton), also alive despite reports of his demise, pulls into a small town with his brutish right-hand man Hank (Cal Bolder). They learn that the townspeople live in fear of Maria Frankenstein (Narda Onyx), the granddaughter -- yes, even the title is wrong -- of the original Dr. Frankenstein, who has fled Europe and is conducting sinister experiments on the children of immigrants living in the town. When Hank is wounded in a shootout with the local lawmen, Maria hatches a diabolical plan to turn him into her own monstrous servant.

Both films were unsurprisingly met with a fusillade of critical bullets, and watching them today doesn’t do either picture any favors. Yet they — along with the slightly more stylish 1959 vampire outlaw film Curse of the Undead and 1965’s witchy revenge thriller The Devil’s Mistress — are among the earliest examples of a genre crossover that has resurfaced over the years in both period and modern dress, generating films that in some cases have turned out to be mini-masterpieces.

The next big year for the horror western was probably 1973, in which none other than western icon Clint Eastwood directed and starred in High Plains Drifter, about a mysterious, nameless stranger who brings chaos and murder to an isolated mining town and may be the ghost of a sheriff that the townspeople had shot down. Eastwood’s eerie, enigmatic film remains one of his best of the ‘70s. That same year also saw the release of western-horror-biker movie (!) crossover Hex and the exploitation quickie Godmonster of Indian Flats, about a giant mutated sheep terrorizing a mining town that’s become a modern-day tourist attraction.

The merging of the horror genre with the neo-western — a film set in modern times but using genre tropes — firmly took root in 1987 with Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, about a clan of nomadic vampires who wander the back roads of the United States and lure a young man (Adrian Pasdar) into their circle. Featuring outstanding performances from Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton, Bigelow’s solo directorial debut is rightly considered a horror classic.

Other films that took the neo-western approach included 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn (directed by Robert Rodriguez from a script by Quentin Tarantino), 1998’s Vampires, directed by John Carpenter, and 2014’s uncategorizable “Iranian vampire western” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. But some of the best horror westerns of recent vintage stayed true to the genre’s period roots: 2004’s Dead Birds pits bank robbers against ghosts on a deserted plantation, J.T. Petty’s 2008 thriller The Burrowers finds a rescue party terrorized by underground monsters in 1879 while searching for a missing family, and 2015’s shockingly brutal Bone Tomahawk pits another rescue posse led by Kurt Russell against a tribe of cannibals.

Science fiction has enjoyed a few crossovers with the western as well, in films (largely featuring either aliens or dinosaurs) like 1969’s The Valley of Gwangi, John Carpenter’s 2001 film Ghosts of Mars, 2011’s Cowboys and Aliens, and even Jordan Peele’s 2022 thriller Nope. There is something about the desolate plains and empty roads of the untamed West, so conducive to myths, folk tales, and the possibility of the supernatural or otherworldly, that makes the mixing of genres seem like a natural fit — even if a cheapo drive-in double bill fired the first shot.

Billy the Kid vs. Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter are both streaming on Tubi.