Later novels include those by Joe R. Lansdale, many featuring the heroic Reverend Jebediah Mercer. Lansdale has often mixed splatterpunk with alternate historyWestern.[7][8] An example is Dead in the West (1983), in which zombies rise after an unjustly lynched Native American shaman has cursed the town of Mud Creek, Texas.[9][10] The prolific Western author Louis L'Amour sometimes ventured into science fiction, as with The Haunted Mesa (1987), which is set amid the ruins of the Anasazi.[11] Horror author Jack Ketchum's work includes The Crossings (2004), an occult novel set in 1848 Arizona.[12] Author Edward M. Erdelac's 2009 series Merkabah Rider follows a Hasidic gunslinger tracking the renegade teacher who betrayed his mystic Jewish order of astral travelers to the Great Old Ones of H.P. Lovecraft.
From the 1940s, many Western comics published stories in which heroes would sometimes encounter monsters, aliens, supervillains, etc. Marvel Comics featured Kid Colt, the longest-running Western character in American comic books, from 1948 to 1979. He became a time traveller, and ultimately, a mutant.[13] The Rawhide Kid, another Marvel time traveller, debuted in a 16-issue series, from March 1955 to September 1957, from Marvel's 1950s predecessor, Atlas Comics.[14]
DC Comics added a horror element to their Western stories by introducing Weird Western Tales in 1972. The title of this series gave rise to the term "Weird West". It ran for eight years and 59 issues. The main character was Jonah Hex, whose popularity secured his own eponymous series.[15][16]
Preacher Special: Saint of Killers, a 4-issue mini-series, was a spin-off from Preacher by Garth Ennis. While the origin of the Saint of Killers in the Old West is the only true Western element in the comic book Preacher, the series has been described as a "Splatterpunk Western" or a mix of the Western with the Gothic.[18]
Deadlands, first published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 1996, originated as a role-playing game which combines the Western and horror genres with steampunk elements. It is set in an alternate 1870s America and draws heavily on gothic horror conventions and old Native American lore to derive its sense of the supernatural. Characters can get involved in situations ranging from bank heists to shoot-outs involving vampires and zombies over the course of their adventures.[33]
The Japanese RPG series Wild Arms, although set in a world of its own, distinctively draws notable inspiration from the Wild West imagery and combines it with magical and fantasy elements which are typical to the genre.
Damnation (2009) is set in alternate universe where the American Civil War was prolonged indefinitely due to advanced steam technology, with the player being tasked with stopping the army of a mad inventor bent on taking over the country.
Undead Nightmare (2010), an expansion to Red Dead Redemption (2010), is a horror Western video game. It tells the tale of an undead outbreak that has spread across the frontier. Other fantasy elements are new weapons such as holy water, and new mythical mounts, which include a unicorn and the Four Horses of the Apocalypse. Its sequel, Red Dead Redemption 2, features a number of minor Easter eggs for the player to discover, such as UFOs and the remains of a giant hominid.[34]
Less-common hybrid genres may include the acid Western – The Shooting (1966) has been cited as the first film of this kind.[35] The horror Western essentially depicts the supernatural in an Old West setting. Kim Newman proposes the two main types are the "Indian Curse cycle" and the gothic Western – featuring vampires, zombies, and the like.[20] An example of the Indian Curse movie is The Ghost Dance (1982), in which a Native American shaman is possessed by an evil spirit.[36][20] A gothic Western example is Ghost Town (1988), about the quest of a sheriff to defeat a zombie gunfighter by using his star-shaped badge as a shuriken.[20]
The steampunk Western, a variant of the science fiction Western using the retrofuturistic technology and aesthetic of the steampunk subgenre, typically depicts an alternative history of the Old West but emphasizes society's reliance on steam power, as in the 1960s TV series The Wild Wild West.[23][24] Another variant of the science-fiction Western is the space Western, which applies Western themes to a science-fiction frontier setting. As such, these works are usually set on other worlds, such as in the series Firefly, but the action sometimes takes place in the Old West, as in Cowboys & Aliens (2011), in which an alien spacecraft lands in 1870s New Mexico Territory.[37]
^Kitson, Niall (2007). "Rebel Yells: Genre Hybridity and Irishness in Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon's Preacher". Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies. 2.
^Rosenbaum, Jonathan (June 26, 1996). "Acid Western: Dead Man". Chicago Reader. Archived from the original on September 29, 2007. Retrieved August 3, 2021.
^Sykes, Brad (2018). Terror in the Desert: Dark Cinema of the American Southwest. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. p. 136. ISBN978-14-76631-32-5.
Green, Paul (October 2009). Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns: Supernatural and Science Fiction Elements in Novels, Pulps, Comics, Films, Television and Games. McFarland. ISBN978-0-7864-4390-1.