North American Western Horror – 6 min
Vienna / Austria (2022)

Power Fudge explores the North American Western-genre, recognizing the landscapes as produced within northern narratives. Central in this exploration is the image of unowned land, that is based on the imperial fantasy of the belonging of land, and was created to justify and glorify the exploitation of land that was inhabited by indigenous people. This produced layer of ownership and absence of ownership forms a virtual replica of colonised landscapes, the Wild West – a place of justification northern exploitation, where heroes are heroes, villains are villains and indigious people are there to complement the white heroes on their journey.

But the Wild West layer is glitching.

Over the last decades the imperialist western and its rebellious posing, neo-imperialist troubled child, the road movie, were drawn closer to the horror genre. This shift in relation to these supposedly wild landscapes of the west and the promised freedom, that northern narratives inscribed in them, suggests the idea of a violent afterthought, an unreflected colonial consciousness, that breaks through in the form of punitive fantasies that turn against the colonisers, the former heroes, that are now fleeing from society. Power Fudge takes the classical western horror theme of the Hitchhiker, setting it in the environment of a literally virtual indefinite desert by undermining the narrative of solitude & individualism.