Clint Eastwood was no stranger to the genres covered by EOFFTV by the early 1970s. He had uncredited roles in Revenge of the Creature (1955), Francis in the Navy (1955) and Tarantula (1955) very early in his career, played himself in an episode of Mister Ed (1958-1966) and had recently appeared in Southern Gothic The Beguiled (1971) and had made his directorial debut with Play Misty for Me (1971). We could, at a pinch, include Dirty Harry (1971), with its deranged serial killer Scorpio, as at least a borderline horror film. And in 1973, for his second film, he brought a fantastical edge to his old stamping ground the western in High Plains Drifter, an allegorical revenge western that also functions as a ghost story.

It begins with a glorious opening shot, Eastwood’s “the stranger” (we only find out his name – possibly – in the closing scene) emerging from a heat haze accompanied by the strange keening wails of Dee Barton’s evocative score. It sets out a statement that this isn’t going to be a straightforward western, that the supernatural is never going to be far away and that the stranger is more than a simple lone gunslinger drifting aimlessly from town to town. In fact, the title, as evocative as Barton’s score, is misleading – what are these “high plains” that the stranger supposedly “drifts? And of course, drifting is the very last thing on his mind – he’s a man on a mission, single-mindedly pursuing his revenge even that means dragging everyone, himself included, into a figurative and literal hell on earth.

After the stranger arrives in the lakeshore town of Lago, it’s a full 7 minutes before we hear the first word uttered (“beer”), a tip of the hat perhaps to Sergio Leone’s C’era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) which opens with a similarly uncommunicative sequence. It’s not the only time that Eastwood tips his Stetson to the directors that inspired him as he worked with them – the town graveyard has headstones inscribed Sergio Leone and Don Siegel.

Lago (Eastwood ignored Universal’s request for him to film High Plains Drifter on their studio lot and had the town built on the shores of Mono Lake in California, a beautifully desolate place that only adds to the film’s dreamlike ambience) is a seemingly quiet and respectable mining town the population of which is unsettled when the stranger guns down three men who threaten him and rapes a young woman, Callie Travers (Mariana Hill). The stranger is haunted by dreams of the murder of the town’s federal marshal, Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn, Eastwood’s stuntman). The townspeople are immediately cowed by the stranger and approach him to replace the three men he killed, hired guns meant to protect them from outlaws Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and brothers Dan (Dan Vadis) and Cole Carlin (Anthony James), Duncan’s murderers who are about to be released from prison. The stranger accepts the challenge of protecting the town, but his demands are often inexplicable – he makes a dwarf, Mordecai (Billy Curtis) the new sheriff and mayor, gives away goods to a Native American who is being abused by a shopkeeper and turfs everyone out of the town hotel. Attempts to kill the stranger are unsuccessful and his grip on the town becomes even stronger – he tries to train a company of volunteers to defend the town, but no-one is really up to the job. So, he arranges a picnic then has the people literally paint the town red, daubing “HELL” over the town sign. The outlaws arrive and a bloody showdown ensues – but who is the stranger and what is his relationship with Duncan?

Screenwriter Ernest Tidyman had originally written the stranger as Jim Duncan’s brother but Eastwood cannily decided that that was too mundane a story to tell and, without ever explicitly saying that he’s the reincarnation of Duncan, leaves the plot open to a more interesting supernaturally-inclined interpretation. Eastwood was less evasive about the supernatural origins of his anti-hero in the film’s spiritual sibling Pale Rider (1985) – in interviews, Eastwood openly stated that the preacher in that film was indeed a ghost – but here’s there’s a little wiggle room until the very last moment. There are hints here and there – Callie firing at him at point blank range while he’s in the bathtub with seemingly no effect, his uncanny awareness of a man standing behind him with knife, an unerring ability with the gun. But only at the very end, when he tells Mordecai that he’s always known his name as Mordecai puts the finishing touches to Duncan’s new headstone does it become clear.

Thus, High Plains Drifter becomes something more than just an extremely well-made pastiche of the classic western. It turns into an existential meditation of revenge and righteous punishment, steeped in symbolism and allegory. It’s also an effective deconstruction of the traditional western, Eastwood taking a scalpel to the genre that defined him in the 1960s and Tidyman finding little virtue in the “God-fearing” hypocrites of Lago. These aren’t the hard-working, salt of the earth pioneers of popular myth but a town full of largely self-serving, back-stabbing low-lives who pretty much deserve everything they get.

The stranger himself is not beyond reproach. He grossly abuses the position of power the people of Lago bestow upon him his own amusement (the film is often darkly very funny) and his decisions are frequently absurd, even childish. As he begins his campaign of belittling the townspeople, he drags them, the film, and the audience down an increasingly dark spiral until we are all, figuratively at least, in hell. The climax, set in a burning Lago, the stranger silhouetted against the flames like the avenging angel he’s become, is every bit as nightmarish as anything in the contemporary horror film.

The film is also often excruciatingly violent. A rape scene near the beginning and various other moments of questionable sexual politics are hard to stomach but few are spared the pain and agony of either the stranger’s retribution of the townspeople themselves. In flashbacks we see that Jim Duncan’s death was extraordinarily cruel and painful, whipped to death by a trio of hired assassins, begging for help from the townsfolk who just look on with blank passivity. Tidyman had been inspired in part by the notorious murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964 in which Genovese was brutally stabbed to death in full view of 38 witnesses who did nothing to help her.

Bleak and cynical, High Plains Drifter has little truck with the moral certainties of the traditional western. It outraged John Wayne who wrote back to Eastwood after the director asked about them making a film together, decrying its violence and its depiction of the town’s people, branding in “un-American”. The allegory may be crude, the symbolism sometimes a little too blunt, but it’s undeniably effective. It owes a debt of sorts perhaps to Sergio Garrone’s Django il bastardo/Django the Bastard (1969), which also features a vengeful and perhaps supernatural gunman, but while it’s rarely all that original, High Plains Drifter remains a key film in the deconstruction of the myth of the old west, a striking and atmospheric film (you have to remind yourself that this was only Eastwood’s second film as director) that continues to allow for multiple readings and interpretations.