7 Best Western Monster Movies, Ranked

4 days ago 8

Published Feb 7, 2026, 12:36 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2200 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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As Pulp Fiction mentions, the path of the righteous man may be beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men, but the path of the Western movie is not usually beset on, um, any side by the chaos of a kaiju movie, nor the tyranny of a giant monster. That’s a long-winded way of saying most Westerns don’t have giant monsters in them, nor regular-sized monsters, if you want to broaden the sub-genre that is the monster film. It’s a way to get Frankenstein and Godzilla side by side, even if Godzilla would run the risk of squashing Frankenstein’s monster were they to actually stand side by side.

Anyway, Westerns sometimes have monstrous characters (there's no movie called The Good, the Nice, and the Wholesome, after all), as a way to unpack morality and the conflict between good and evil and all that, but genuine monsters are less common. Monster movies that are also Westerns, though, aren’t unheard of, as the following movies will hopefully help demonstrate. Now, with some of these, you have to stretch the definition of Western and/or monster movie, but that was done because it’s otherwise quite hard to find more than half a dozen examples. These ones probably qualify. If you disagree, please complain about it in the comments, because it’s good for engagement, and ya boy needs his engagement because, to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, there exist bills and debts that no honest man can pay. (Starting this intro with Tarantino, continuing it with a mention of Godzilla, and ending it with Springsteen. This is the most me thing that has ever me'd).

7 'The White Buffalo' (1977)

If you ever wanted to watch Jaws, but with a buffalo instead of a shark, and also it’s a Western, plus it’s not nearly as good, then maybe The White Buffalo is for you. Truthfully, the question has to be asked regarding why you'd want to watch such a film, but hey, it exists. And it’s kind of interesting, even if it’s far from great, but the weirdness of it, and some of the partially interesting qualities… they're not nothing. They make it a decent enough curiosity.

The other intriguing part of The White Buffalo is the fact that the two main characters are real-life individuals from the Old West, Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse, who meet here and go on a fictional quest to find a giant white buffalo, both of them with their own reasons for wanting to hunt down the mythical beast. Maybe then it can also be likened to RRR, which is about two real-life revolutionary fighters who get wrapped up in a more fantastical conflict made bombastic for the big screen, but The White Buffalo also isn't nearly as good as RRR. Uh, yeah, the intro mentioned it was hard to find good Western monster movies. So that’s why one that’s not very good had to be included, because a top 7 just feels a tiny bit more legit than a top 6.

6 'The Valley of Gwangi' (1969)

Keeping the Steven Spielberg comparisons going for a bit, The Valley of Gwangi might well satisfy in the way Jurassic Park does, because that 1993 movie is about dinosaurs causing havoc in the 20th century. Technically, The Valley of Gwangi is about the same thing, though it’s set much earlier in the 20th century, specifically in its earliest decade. But the whole Old West thing was still sort of going on at that point, in some parts of the U.S., so with this movie, you get cowboys fighting dinosaurs.

The Valley of Gwangi is not great, by any means, but it has some interesting and creative special effects, and it functions well enough as a B-movie.

That’s the elevator pitch, at least, and if Cowboys & Aliens got greenlit because of its title summarizing the movie, then maybe The Valley of Gwangi also came into existence because someone thought, “Hey, cowboys don’t usually go up against dinosaurs. Maybe doing that would be neat.” It’s cooler on paper than it is in execution. This one’s not great, by any means, but it has some interesting and creative special effects, and it functions as a B-movie better than The White Buffalo does, at the very least.

5 'Tremors' (1990)

A big monster bursting out of the ground in the desert, in the first Tremors movie

Tremors is a fun, solid 1990s B-grade monster movie, but B-grade in a good way. It’s got a setting that’s close enough to a neo-Western one for it to qualify for a spot in this particular ranking. It takes place in a desert town, and that’s enough. The isolated setting gives it a bit of a unique spin, as far as monster movies go, and the monsters themselves are pretty cool, since they're sort of giant and vicious worms that live underground.

They're not quite Dune-sized or anything, but maybe they were Dune-inspired. Though Tremors is a good deal more tongue-in-cheek than any Dune adaptation, and that’s a sci-fi property, rather than a Western one, even if it’s also got a lot of scenes in the desert. Also, Tremors has become a franchise, quite surprisingly, but nothing’s really come close to touching this first movie, from 1990, quality-wise.

4 'Near Dark' (1987)

Bill Paxton, Lance Henricksen, Jennette Goldstein as Severen, Jesse, and Diamondback playing cards in a motel room in 'Near Dark'

As long as a vampire movie can be counted as a monster movie, then Near Dark qualifies for present purposes. It functions as a neo-Western, given that it doesn’t take place in Old West times, but it has that Western feel to it. It takes place in Oklahoma, and the plot is fairly simple, since it’s about a young man who gets bitten by a vampire, and then he falls in with a group of vampires associated with the woman who turned him, a couple of whom have been around since the era of the Old West (or so they claim).

It wasn’t the first movie Kathryn Bigelow directed, but it was probably her first great movie, even if it does still feel somewhat underrated. At least Near Dark has cult classic status, which it very much deserves. Does deserve more, of course, but there are plenty of other movies out there that would probably kill to be cult, so you gotta take what you can get sometimes or whatever.

3 'Bone Tomahawk' (2015)

And after all that talk about vampires, here’s a movie that might be even more of a stretch to label as a monster movie: Bone Tomahawk. Look, this one scores points for being very intense and full-on as a horror movie, and the antagonists here are truly monstrous and inhuman, so maybe they can qualify as monsters. They're unable to be reasoned with, and they're sadistic in ways that can’t really be described if one is writing an article and wants to keep it the equivalent of PG.

Nothing PG about Bone Tomahawk, of course, should you choose to watch it. It’s got a notorious reputation for being one of the grisliest Westerns ever made, and such infamy is well deserved. There are things here that, once seen, cannot be unseen. The movie itself is good, for sure, but you do have to have a strong stomach to tackle it. You might think, “How bad can it be?”, but it really is bad. Not bad quality-wise, but terribly gory. Viewer discretion is very much advised and all that.

2 'From Dusk till Dawn' (1996)

Okay, back to vampires. Sorry if that’s kind of a spoiler, because From Dusk till Dawn famously does not kick off feeling like a vampire or monster movie, since it’s more of a crime thriller early on. There are two brothers who are also ruthless criminals, and they want to make an escape, with their getaway plan involving taking a family hostage and using them to get across the U.S. border and into Mexico.

Things are going well enough until they all wait out at an isolated strip club, and then while there, it turns out said venue is a vampire hangout, and so the movie quite abruptly turns into an action/horror movie. It’s a great switch-up, and it has just been spoiled, technically, but then there are also other places From Dusk till Dawn goes following that shake-up that won’t be detailed here. If you liked the more recent Sinners (which isn't really a Western, neo or otherwise, and does establish the vampire stuff earlier), then From Dusk till Dawn is easy to recommend.

1 'Nope' (2022)

Jordan Peele went to some interesting and ambitious places with Nope, after making two other very good horror movies that were smaller in scale. His most intimate, Get Out, probably remains his best, but then Us was interesting, if a little messier (but bigger, yes). And then Nope is almost an epic compared to those first two movies. If The White Buffalo could be likened to Jaws, to some extent, and The Valley of Gwangi did a “dinosaurs in more contemporary times” thing like Jurassic Park, then maybe Nope can be likened to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but in a way that more turns into Jaws as it goes along, and especially so in its final act.

The setting makes it a neo-Western of sorts, and so if you count it as a Western, it’s up there with the best in recent memory. Also, more so than most giant monster movies, Nope is genuinely terrifying at times, though there’s stuff here with a chimpanzee that might admittedly be scarier than most of the sequences with the much larger violent (and alien) creature. It’s a strange movie, compared to most blockbusters, but it’s also very cool and maybe a bit underrated/overlooked. Not everyone knew entirely what to make of it, when Nope came out, yet hopefully, it'll get appreciated further as time goes on. It has a feel to it that suggests/implies it might well end up being that kind of movie.