The 10 Heaviest Westerns of All Time, Ranked

Some Westerns are pretty fun, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Silverado, owing to having a strong sense of adventure and/or spectacle in them, and then you’ve also got outright Western comedies like Blazing Saddles that are entertaining for other reasons. Blazing Saddles does have some serious things to say, in terms of what it’s about, but it goes about delivering such stuff in a gleefully unserious way.

There are also some classic Westerns that might feel a bit escapist or morally straightforward in nature, coming from an arguably simpler time, or it was perhaps more that they wanted to depict the West as a potentially simple/straightforward time. Whatever the case, the following ones do not fit into any of those categories, and stand out for being among the heaviest Westerns ever made. They're ranked below, starting with the fairly bleak and ending with the most despair-filled.

10 'Heaven's Gate' (1980)

It was probably all the negative press around Heaven’s Gate that most directly contributed to its failure at the box office, though the length and subject matter might not have helped. It’s a very long film, and it’s also one that feels pretty soul-crushing throughout, as it’s about a bloody conflict being fought between wealthy cattle farmers and struggling immigrants, which blows up into a full-on range war.

You get a lot of famous people showing up in this movie, and there’s also a good deal of spectacle in Heaven’s Gate that’s sometimes exciting, but the more downbeat scenes – and the acts of cruelty shown throughout – probably stick with one the most once it’s over. Still, it’s a very good film, and one that’s so much better than its initial reception might suggest, so if you're okay with heaviness and a long runtime, it’s genuinely worth checking out.

9 'Eddington' (2025)

Eddington is very recent, at the time of writing, and it’s also distinctly a neo-Western, rather than a traditional or period one, but one day, 2020 will be as far back as the late 1800s are now, so long as no massive disaster destroys the world or anything. So, Eddington doesn’t really feel historical the way other Westerns are, but maybe one day… and also, the setting helps it stand out.

It’s a movie that asks you to relive the early 2020s, and it’s not fun, because it’s all focused on the uncertainty of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular emphasis on all the division and conflict caused. There’s a good bit of dark comedy here, but the emphasis is on the “dark” there maybe more than the “comedy,” and even if you’ve seen Ari Aster’s other movies, you might well still be surprised by how cynical and unapologetically nasty Eddington gets at certain points.

8 'The Wild Bunch' (1969)

If there’s a silver lining to The Wild Bunch, and the bloodshed that happens in its final act, it’s that feeling of people going out on their own terms, given the world’s passed them by and there’s not really anything they can do anymore. Actually, even put that way, it’s still pretty miserable; just not as heavy-going as a film about people trying to persevere and adapt, only to keep failing.

The Wild Bunch is pretty harrowing and uncompromisingly violent for a movie of its time.

There’s a little catharsis there, though it’s still undeniable that The Wild Bunch is pretty harrowing and uncompromisingly violent for a movie of its time, with it feeling like it could’ve been a final – and funereal – statement for the genre overall. That wasn’t to be, of course, and even its director, Sam Peckinpah, made more Westerns post-1969 (including Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which should get an honorable mention here for also being quite depressing), but at the time, it probably felt as though it was the end.

7 'Bone Tomahawk' (2015)

The thing people usually mention first about the aforementioned Heaven’s Gate is the fact it was a notorious flop, and there’s also something you'll usually hear first whenever someone brings up Bone Tomahawk: that it’s absolutely brutal. It kind of has to be, to some extent, given it’s a mash-up of the Western and horror genres, and the ultimate foes are particularly brutal, but it’s still quite shocking where Bone Tomahawk goes.

The violence is a big reason why it’s heavy-going, though not the only one. Bone Tomahawk manages to feel rather hopeless in other ways, and it’s even somber at times (mostly, at times when there’s not a great deal of violence being depicted on screen, because that stuff does take center-stage when it’s there, inevitably). If you’ve got a strong enough stomach, though, it’s definitely worth watching.

6 'Walker' (1987)

Walker is a historical movie that gets memorably anachronistic at certain points, and it’s also a film that manages to be about as savage and downbeat as it is strange. The strangeness of it all clashes with the historical side of things in a genuinely unsettling way, and there’s also a pretty simple premise for a fairly weird movie, as it’s about the real-life William Walker leading a force of mercenaries into Nicaragua and establishing himself as the country’s president.

Everything’s jarring, and Walker succeeds in being a depiction of a bleak and violent real-life event that’s made more uncomfortable because of how it reflected certain things that were happening at the time of its release. It’s the kind of thing that might well be too effective, as a piece of satire and social commentary, for some to handle, but props to Walker – and its director, Alex Cox – for going there.

5 'No Country for Old Men' (2007)

Like Eddington, No Country for Old Men is a neo-Western, but it’s still going to be counted here among all the other Westerns of an arguably more traditional nature. Perhaps it’s more of a crime/thriller movie, and it takes place in the late 20th century, rather than in the second half of the 19th century, though a Western’s still a Western, and No Country for Old Men is an all-time great Western.

Oh, and it’s also one of the most miserable Westerns in relatively recent memory, too. No Country for Old Men is all about failure, and it’s also hugely nihilistic, with anticlimaxes and a purposeful lack of catharsis making it quite somber, at least when it’s not also being unnerving and suspenseful. It’s still not as dark as a potential Blood Meridian movie would be, though (that’s another harrowing Western written by Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the novel upon which No Country for Old Men was based).

4 'Duck, You Sucker' (1971)

Watching Sergio Leone’s Westerns in chronological order makes for a very interesting experience, since you’ve got the (mostly) fun Dollars trilogy followed up by the more bittersweet – but still not quite depressing – Once Upon a Time in the West, and then an all-out downer with his final Western, Duck, You Sucker. It has a title that suggests fun, or maybe even schlock, but that’s not what this is about, and the alternative title of “Once Upon a Time… the Revolution” is much more fitting.

That also ties this in thematically with Once Upon a Time in the West and then Once Upon a Time in America, the latter being Leone’s final film, and his only one that’s potentially heavier than Duck, You Sucker (it's not a Western, though, being a gangster epic instead). Duck, You Sucker is all about the Mexican Revolution, and two very flawed main characters getting wrapped up in it, and eventually being crushed by greater forces of evil than either can compete with. It’s an odd and under-seen movie, but potentially also a masterpiece, or at least something close to it.

3 'Soldier Blue' (1970)

The uncut version of Soldier Blue makes The Wild Bunch look tame, in comparison. It came out just one year later, and managed to outdo that Sam Peckinpah film in the “brutal final act” department. This is the part where usually, “you have to see it to believe it” would be said, but what happens in Soldier Blue might be best left unseen, and that’s not something you can say about a great many movies that are 56 years old.

Things build toward a depiction of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre, with much of Soldier Blue, before that ending sequence, being a good deal lighter, which makes the ending hit harder and feel more surprising. Well, technically, there’s some violence at the start of the movie, and then it’s oddly laidback for a long while, and then you're thrown off balance again at the film’s conclusion. It’s a savage and ultimately quite unpleasant movie, but it’s savage and unpleasant purposefully; for a reason, in other words.

2 'The Nightingale' (2018)

Another movie here largely because of its violence, The Nightingale shows a lot of it in great detail, more so than most R-rated movies, Western or otherwise. Maybe it’s also a little unexpected, as a title, to be included here, as a Western, since it’s set in Australia rather than the U.S., but it does get classified in that way, and a movie doesn’t have to be set in the U.S. to be a Western.

The premise here involves two people who want vengeance because of their traumatic pasts, but there isn't really catharsis or entertainment value the way you might get in (the also brutal) Django Unchained, even if the premise and central character dynamic are sort of comparable. The Nightingale is just a lot to take in and process, even more so than director Jennifer Kent’s previous movie: the also quite upsetting and trauma-heavy The Babadook.

1 'The Great Silence' (1968)

In The Great Silence, there are relatively obvious villains and a pretty clear-cut hero, but little else feels traditional or close to the norm, by the standards of either the Western genre or even just movies/narratives more generally. Said hero is a mute gunslinger, and his task involves defending a group of outlaws from some relentless bounty hunters, and all of it’s happening against an intensely wintry backdrop.

Even if it had traditional (in other words, sunnier) scenery, The Great Silence would still rank among the heaviest Westerns of all time, but that literal coldness pushes it over the edge, and makes it perhaps the most soul-crushing of them all. Some of the aforementioned Western movies have more confronting/violent content, admittedly, yet there’s an emptiness and sense of depression in The Great Silence that makes it next-level, for present ranking purposes.