Why Christopher Nolan’s Next Movie Should Be a Western Instead of Horror

Christopher Nolan wants to make a horror movie. He’s said as much on the record, more than once. Most recently, he said that horror “very much whets my appetite” (via The Hollywood Reporter). He also admitted that the genre has to be approached carefully, that it demands, in his words, an amazing idea before he’d commit. His desire is real, but it doesn’t fit, at least for me.

This is because the genre that has really been waiting for Christopher Nolan is not horror (or an elevated horror prestige piece he would likely end up with), but Western. The Western genre has everything he needs: the moral ledger, the empty land, the men who mistake control for grace. Let me explain.

A Western Is Better Suited to Christopher Nolan

The whole structure of horror is based on the failure of epistemology: the unknowable, the inevitable, and the unexplainable. However, this philosophy is alien to Nolan’s filmmaking. In his films, the antagonists are not monsters but systems: time in Memento (to be fair, Christopher Nolan is obsessed with time in literally every one of his movies); gravity and relativity in Interstellar; the bomb, transformed into raw fear, in Oppenheimer. But his protagonists are men who, to the brink of self-destruction, believe in the power of reason and logic to overcome the system.

The Western is constructed out of the same desire, only directed outward toward empty terrain rather than a chalkboard. At its core, the Western is a genre of imposed order; a man with a set of code and a gun who believes that he can make the morally bankrupt, indifferent world conform to his ideals. That isn’t a side interest to Christopher Nolan’s fixations. That is the fixation. Well, sans the horses and the hats.

Horror needs its protagonist to flinch. How else, after all, would the audience relate to them? The Western needs him to double down until the doubling down is his tragedy. Christopher Nolan has never once made a movie about a flincher. Even Oppenheimer, watching the weapon of mass destruction he helped design being used precisely as he knew it would be used, does not flinch. He recalculates.

His Greatest Films Already Share Western DNA

Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey | Credits: Universal Pictures

You do not require any squinting to make out the underlying structure of a Western in his various movies. Insomnia is perhaps his most underappreciated and even underseen work, and also the most literal frontier movie as well. It is about a lawman slowly breaking down under the never-setting sun, undone by the same rigid moral fiber he entered with. Take away the Alaskan fishing town, and you’re left with a High Noon where the Insomnia becomes the timer, the hero forced out of the only thing that gave him hope in his righteousness: the darkness.

The Prestige is two men turning themselves, their families, their reputations into ashes over a code that neither can articulate aloud. Structurally speaking, it is about the most ancient form of blood feud there’s ever been in a Western. Throw in The Dark Knight, which shows a man making his own laws since the system collapsed under its own weight, and it’s no longer Western-style filmmaking. It’s filmmaking without the Western.

Even films like Interstellar and Dunkirk, which are purportedly his most un-Western movies, contain that essential grammar of the frontier: the indifferent (if not antagonistic) landscapes to the men who traverse them. This has nothing to do with the inheritance of science fiction or war movie genres. It has everything to do with John Ford’s legacy. It has everything to do with the legacy of Cormac McCarthy.

And now he’s come up with The Odyssey, a story which, despite all its ancient garb, remains the most Western story he’s ever done, whether he will admit it or not. Ditch the Aegean Sea and gods and monsters in The Odyssey, and what you get is a man walking through hostile, indifferent country on the strength of sheer willpower and a set of principles he doesn’t even know are valid anymore. He is heading towards a homeland that has already forgotten what he looks like. Even homecoming in the ending of The Odyssey is bittersweet. That’s the grammar of every gunslinger who survived his own legend to return to the town which had, metaphorically, buried him.

The Western Is Ready for Its Nolan Moment

The Western genre has been undergoing a revival for quite a while now: films like The Power of the Dog, Hell or High Water (one of Taylor Sheridan’s best movies), and News of the World, and a few prestigious television series that have been able to take a more psychologically complex approach to the genre than most theatrical films bothered to attempt. What they haven’t yet seen, though, is what happens when that is put through Christopher Nolan’s particular filmmaking toolbox: timelines that don’t sit still, sound as a weapon instead of texture, scale used to make an argument instead of just to impress people.

Imagine an old-fashioned Western told in the style of Memento and featuring a similar ending (still one of the best movie endings in Nolan’s career). Not just backwards but also with an unreliable protagonist or narrator. The audience discovers towards the end that the hero had been the villain all along just after the point where it matters. Consider the countdown narrative structure of Dunkirk but apply it to a manhunt — the same ticking dread with no hope of rescue at all.

What has always been intrinsic in the Western was some sort of an end, an end to the frontier, of the code, or the notion of what it means to be a man in the ‘civilized’ world ushered in after the lawlessness of the Wild West. Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker whose work constantly revolves around a shutting down of systems. The lock-and-load nature of the heist. The self-consumption of the loop. The nuclear bomb that cannot be un-invented.

Would you watch Christopher Nolan’s Western before you’d watch his horror movie? Tell us which genre you think actually fits him better in the comments below.

Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, The Odyssey, is currently running in US theaters. It was released on July 17.