Vampire Cowboy Cyborg Racist Firestorm

Paul Bettany (left), Maggie Q (right), and Cam Gigandet (rear) in Priest

When the nameless Priest threatens to kill his niece, Lucy, if he believes she’d been “infected,” the whole picture comes together. I realize why Scott Stewart’s action-horror film Priest, which died on arrival in 2011 despite an all-star cast and elaborate technical prestige, bothers me. Because, despite its attempts to look new-fangled and edgy, this movie is essentially a remake.

This is John Ford’s 1956 cowboy, ahem, “classic,” The Searchers.

This leads me to an important question: is it possible for a movie, which never mentions race or racial concerns, to nevertheless be racist? John Ford supposedly intended his Western to plumb the depths of White racism that so permeated Texas cowboy culture, that it became unnoticed, simply normal. However, many audiences watching The Searchers have suggested it fails that goal, instead serving to glorify the racism which often exudes from John Wayne movies.

In Priest, the titular protagonist, veteran of a war which civilized people would rather forget, gets contacted by a frontier lawman. Seems the vampires have attacked Priest’s brother’s homestead, killed his family, burned his home, and kidnapped Priest’s niece. Only Priest has the skills necessary to outwit the vampires and bring Lucy home safely. But Priest worries about something far worse: what if Lucy has been miscegenated?

Seriously. Replace the word “vampire” with “Comanche,” and it’s the same story.

Researching this essay, I discovered director Scott Stewart and screenwriter Cory Goodman included these references deliberately. They considered it a homage. Which isn’t entirely unfair: many auteurs, including George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, have picked over The Searchers for artistic influence. From Luke Skywalker’s burning homestead to David Lean’s long desert pan shots in Lawrence of Arabia, Ford’s movie casts a long shadow over cinema generally.

As I’ve written elsewhere, literature becomes classic if it speaks both to the time it was created, and to our time. The Searchers reflects a time when racism appeared everywhere in American society, and when challenged on it, the White response was to double down. When John Wayne, as Ethan Edwards, speaks vile slurs against the Comanche, we today feel uncomfortable, not because this behavior happened in the 1870s or 1950s, but because it happens today.

John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is racist. Not only does he despise Native Americans, and Comanche in particular, but he so despises their influence, that he announces his intention to murder his own kin if he believes the Comanche have changed her—which, implicitly, means if they’ve had sex with her. Maintaining Debbie’s purity becomes Ethan’s obsession. Her White identity, evidently, can be irreparably marred by the Indians.

Priest maintains all these themes, Ethan’s obsession with family and purity and his willingness to kill his own blood rather than see her made impure. It just erases any reference to race. Indeed, despite the movie’s broad use of frontier homesteader themes, including railroads and “reservations,” the movie’s only non-White character is mixed-race Maggie Q, former protégé to Jackie Chan. The movie avoids racial discussions by whitewashing the frontier.

Yet despite scrubbing any reference to race, this movie remains littered with what look like racist dog whistles. The “vampires” live on “reservations,” tended by “familiars,” humans who’d rather live among the vampires than in human towns. At one point, the protagonists pursue the vampires to their homeland, which looks suspiciously like a giant African termite mound. The horrible, monstrous vampires even swarm like insects.

So unlike The Searchers, which, its defenders insist, was critical of Ethan’s racism, Priest simply omits race altogether. Yet where The Searchers foregrounds Ethan’s frequent bigoted statements, subjecting them to critical scrutiny, Priest buries racial issues in symbolism. Therefore, the latter movie’s defenders (who, admittedly, are few) could charge me with being the real racist, for even bringing race into the discussion.

Let’s not kid ourselves: despite its ambiguous dealings with racism, The Searchers is a good movie, an adept and difficult portrait of one man’s obsessions, which he uses as coping mechanisms to bury his guilt over supporting the Civil War’s losing side. Priest, by contrast, is lousy, a ragbag of science fiction and horror boilerplates assembled hastily to make a dollar. Maybe analyzing it gives credence it doesn’t deserve.

Yet racism remains widespread in America today, as recent events have exposed. Papering over Ethan Edwards’ racism doesn’t make it go away. Indeed, Priest’s White triumphalism, coupled with “othering” images, is arguably more vexing, since it doesn’t permit us to address its hero's racism directly. It just lets us continue pretending nothing’s wrong.