The Wind (2019) Review

Demons of the Prairie

I'm a big fan of westerns. The danger is real on the frontier. Western towns are always isolated and forced to be completely self-reliant. If shit hits the fan, help is days away. If a group of bandits maraud a town at night, the next day a Sheriff and maybe a deputy or two have to ride off into the middle of nowhere to hunt them down, leaving the townsfolk unprotected. Life is hard, dangerous and unpredictable. It's surprising there's not more western horrors.

Bone Tomahawk and Ravenous are the only other big horror westerns that come to mind. The Pale Door shows promise as an upcoming release that pairs western horror with witchcraft. Bone Tomahawk was more western than horror and Ravenous was more cannibalism than anything else. The Wind was refreshingly more horror than western.

The Wind had a similar vibe as The Witch, in that it's a slow burn with mounting tension that erupts at the end. But unlike The Witch, the story is told in an awesomely non-linear way that keeps you seriously engaged.

It's also somewhat similar to Godless, a western miniseries on Netflix, in which women play all the lead roles. In The Wind, two women play lead while the men are simply background noise, for the most part. And it really works. The setting in which the women who normally rely on the men, men who aren't able to help in this case, effectively establishes a strong sense of vulnerability and desperation.

Isolation, vulnerability, danger, prairie demons... what's not to like?

Worth Watching?