Bone Tomahawk Statement
The film Bone Tomahawk, by S. Craig Zahler takes place in an old western town, in the
desert and in a cave. Four men set out on a journey to save three townspeople who have been captured by the savage group of cave dwellers while nobody was around. The four men include a sheriff, his deputy, a gunslinger and a cowboy with a broken leg. Fear is explained through the creation of this film with the help from a group of savage cannibal cave dwellers. The savages bring out torture by ripping humans limb from limb and killing them slowly, then eating them. The film creates anxiety when surprise attacks are done on the explorers by the cave dwellers. The cave dwellers are most definitely considered misfits to society. They do not wear clothes and they do not speak English. The dwellers have developed their own way of communication by using an extremely loud howl/screeching noise. They are able to make this noise by inserting a certain bone inside of their necks. The cowboy with a broken leg gets left behind and soon catches up, but he must work his way into the cave. In order to survive you must outsmart your opponent to outlive them. Doing so by hiding out on the cave dwellers because there are seven of them left and only one towns person left to fight. He shoots a cave dweller in the chest, then rips his whistle contraption out of his throat and uses it to call in more dwellers without them being alarmed so he can pull the surprise attack on them. I enjoyed the towns people coming together and working as a team to defeat the cave dwellers. If the option to change anything was there, I would remove the cave dwellers from the film and substitute them for Indians. Cave dwellers are great characters but very unrealistic, which makes it hard to picture as something that could actually happen. Also I would leave most of the gruesome torturing scenes out and just add more quick deaths in. By creating fear in the film it keeps the audience hooked onto keep watching because they always want to know what is going to happen next. A sequel could be added to this film very easily, during the end of the film it doesn’t show the last 2 cave dwellers coming back to try and kill the escaping towns people. The squeal could include the cave dwellers rebuilding their community again and repopulating, then attempting another attack on the small western town. By adding more characters to the film if could make it more interesting. This could be accomplished by doubling the amount of cave dweller and adding more cowboy/gunslingers into the town. The cowboys and gunslingers would work together to save the towns people and kill off the cave dwellers. I hope my audience will think about how things can be accomplished when people work together as a group. Also hope my audience will wonder what happens next during each scene in the film. Some questions that propel my creation would be how hard do I want the towns people to suffer. Also you want to make the cave dwellers look very bad and have the audience not feel bad if one is killed. Although if an important character is killed off, you want the audience to feel like they have lost a brother or sister and to continue watching to find out what happens next.