Good, Great or Excellent?

Welcome back to the RetrOasis. Today, we are strapping on our six-shooters and diving into a subgenre that I genuinely want to love: the Horror-Western.

The problem? I can’t think of a single, genuinely good one I’ve ever seen. And after spinning the rare DVD for today’s flick—2006’s “After Sundown” (sometimes mistaken as After Sunset)—I’m a little sad to report that my search for that elusive masterpiece continues.

But check out that custom disc art up top. Lionsgate gave it a great domestic release back in the mid-2000s, and it looks beautiful on a physical shelf. Yet, if you peer closely at the top of that plastic, you’ll see our signature truth stamped right onto it: NOT ON STREAMING. The digital landscape has completely buried this Texas indie, making physical media the only way to ride this weird range.

The Setup: Rock Gulch, Texas meets the Undead

The premise here is wildly ambitious. It kicks off with a pure, classic 19th-century Horror-Western opening, but right after the credits roll, it yanks you into modern times. A crew is relocating an old cemetery in the town of Rock Gulch, Texas, and unearths a perfectly preserved corpse of a woman with a wooden stake through her heart.

Naturally, they pull the stake out.

She wakes up, and her resurrection signals her undead cowboy-vampire husband to come track her down. The twist? He doesn’t just drink blood—he unleashes a wave of mindless zombies to act as his personal minion army. Is it a demon movie? A vampire movie? A zombie movie? For the first half, it’s hard to tell. There’s even a hilarious low-budget car chase scene where you hear tires squealing dramatically… while the car is clearly spinning out on patches of soft lawn grass.

Eventually, a flashback sequence told through an old journal explains the rules: a cowboy vampire who can control the local zombie population. Okay, now I get it.

The $20,000 Canon Battleground

Directed by Christopher Abram and Michael W. Brown, After Sundown is a textbook definition of determined, micro-budget indie filmmaking. It was shot around Fort Worth, Texas, for a measly $20,000 using a single Canon digital video camera.

When you’re working with that kind of lunch money, things go wrong. The production faced a brutal schedule, lost locations, and actors walking off the set mid-shoot, forcing massive rewrites on the fly. Rumor has it the two directors had massive creative clashes over the tone. Co-director Brown’s version—which cut down a lot of the explicit horror elements in favor of a convoluted, action-heavy ending—is the one that officially made it onto the disc. The acting? Let’s call it a solid D-.

Why It’s a RetrOasis Resident

• The Minion Mashup: While the execution is rough, fusing vampire and zombie lore into a Western siege scenario (heavily nodding to Night of the Living Dead) is a genuinely original concept.
• The Bootleg Legend: Only one official cut was authorized for the Lionsgate DVD, but whispers of unauthorized, bloodier alternate cuts have circulated in deep-cut horror forums for years.
• The Verdict: I always try to say something good about every movie that stops by the RetrOasis. In this department, the historical flashback scenes are actually pretty cool and hold a lot of atmospheric promise. If the writing had been tighter and the narrative more cohesive, this genuinely could have been the holy grail Horror-Western I’ve been hunting for.

Instead, it’s an ambitious, flawed, highly eccentric piece of Texas indie history. It didn’t lasso the moon, but it’s a fun, zero-budget artifact worth watching just to see an undead cowboy lead a zombie army through modern Texas. Track down the DVD, dust off the player, and see it for yourself!

Do you know of a truly great Horror-Western that I’ve missed, or is this subgenre just cursed to stay in the low-budget wilderness? Hit me up in the comments!

#RetrOasis #AfterSundown #HorrorWestern #IndieHorror #PhysicalMedia #NotOnStreaming #Zombies #Vampires