Bone Tomahawk Ending Explained

2015 Western horror Tomahawk Bone presents a brutally dark depiction of the Old West, but the film’s twists and turns are not clearly explained until the dark ending. Tomahawk Bone is the directorial debut of S. Craig Zahler, who went on to direct Fight in cell block 99 and Dragged through concrete. Tomahawk Bone divided critics upon release, earning praise for its unflinching brutality but criticism for its questionable portrayal. Earning less than $500,000 at the box office on a budget of $1.8 million, Tomahawk Bone is one of the many Western box office bombs of the first decades of the 21st century.

While the film’s fusion of horror and Western elements may have turned off viewers, Tomahawk BoneThe cast of characters is still a compelling bunch. The film’s plot sees the taciturn sheriff Franklin Hunt, played by Kurt Russell, leading a group of cowboys from the small town of Bright Hope on a rescue mission. Patrick Wilson’s wounded local, Arthur, joins the group because his wife, Samantha, is among the people kidnapped by a tribe of troglodytes. Inbred mountain people who descend from a Native American tribe, troglodytes are amoral villains who torture, maim, and eat their captives. The rescue mission is successful, albeit with some casualties.

Why does Arthur blow the whistle at the end of Bone Tomahawk

Arthur hopes to discover any surviving troglodytes

In Tomahawk BoneAt the end of, Hunt ends up trapped in the Troglodytes’ cave lair alongside Samantha. The immensely powerful troglodytes gruesomely kill one of the sheriff’s deputies before Hunt tricks them into drinking opium, killing one and knocking out another. Arthur arrives late and kills two troglodytes. He discovers that the tribesmen use bizarre animal bones lodged in their windpipes as a primitive form of communication. Arthur sneaks in and helps free Samantha and the surviving sheriff’s deputy, Chicory. Hunt and Arthur kill the troglodyte leader and Hunt remains behind in the cave lair.

Once free from the cave, Arthur blows the Troglodyte’s animal bone whistle as he heads home. Since the whistle successfully lured Bone Tomahawk’s troglodyte monsters out of hiding earlyArthur reasonably assumes the same trick will work again. He is relieved to discover that there are none left, and the group then hears a trio of gunshots coming from the cave. While Tomahawk BoneLeaving nothing to the imagination’s most gruesome death scene, this ambiguous ending implies that Hunt may have killed the returning troglodytes before turning his gun on himself. Alternatively, he may have killed his female prisoners.

What happened to the female troglodytes at the end of Bone Tomahawk

The women of the tribe go blind and have their limbs amputated

In what remains one of the film’s most controversial twists, Tomahawk BoneThe ending of reveals that the female members of the troglodyte tribe are blind and have their limbs removed.. The obvious implication is that the male members of the tribe use them for reproduction purposes, in what is arguably the most disturbing image in the film. This shocking premise has no basis in reality nor any form of historical record, leading some critics to criticize Tomahawk BoneThe Western genre’s contributions to the historically problematic representation of Native American tribes and their traditions. Notably, Tomahawk Bone features an educated Native American character.

This minor supporting character rejects the savagery of the troglodytes, distancing them from real-life Native American tribes. Despite this, the horrific fate of Native women still generated resistance. Kurt Russell’s horror film plays out like a Western version The hills have eyesand 2007 The Hills Have Eyes Part II featured a similar stomach-churning sequence. The fate of Tomahawk BoneTroglodyte women are unclear. Hunt may have mercifully killed them off-screen during the final scene, or they may have died slowly after the male troglodytes were wiped out.

Why does Hunt stay in the cave at the end of Bone Tomahawk

Kurt Russell’s character sacrifices himself to save the survivors

In Tomahawk Boneis ending, Kurt Russell’s hunt remains in the cave so he can kill any troglodytes that return before he dies. Hunt accepts that he will die soon, as the extensive torture the tribesmen have inflicted on him is too substantial to survive. Rather than take his life immediately, Hunt chooses to lie in wait and ambush any surviving troglodytes. This is an ironic mirror of how the troglodytes themselves operated throughout the film, attacking the cowboy crew when their defenses were down and raiding their town and camps under cover of darkness.

How Hunt saves Arthur O’Dwyer at the end of Bone Tomahawk

The sheriff tricks the troglodytes into drinking liquor spiked with opium

The Troglodytes of Tomahawk Bone are stronger than any human being, with the villains in Kurt Russell’s western film seeming more like mythical monsters than human antagonists. As such, Hunt needs to trick the tribesmen into allowing the survivors to overpower the physically stronger troglodytes. Russell’s hero achieves this feat when Hunt mixes opium in his drinking flask and tricks the troglodytes into consuming it.resulting in one villain dying from an overdose while another falls unconscious. Enraged by this trick, the leader later heats the same vial and pushes it into Hunt’s open wound as revenge for his losses.

What Bone Tomahawk’s Ending Really Means

Controversial horror western offers a dark take on the wild west

As Matthew Carter argued in “The perpetuation of myth: ideology in Bone Tomahawk,” Western horror recasts the Native American antagonists of earlier Westerns as absurdly evil and inhuman monsters. This results in an exaggerated version of the problem.”Cowboys and Indians” stories found in the pre-revisionist era of the genre, with the horror elements allowing Tomahawk Bone to make its natives more monstrous than any previous Western villains. Because the opening act features a single Native American character saying that the troglodytes are not ordinary Native Americans, the film can portray them as uniquely abhorrent without fear of criticism.

Tomahawk BoneTroglodytes are the embodiment of the most outrageous and exaggerated fears projected onto Native American tribes. Where the equally violent romance Blood Meridian presents scenes of breathtaking horror inflicted by colonizers on indigenous populations. Here, the indigenous population of Bright Hope is portrayed as an irredeemable group of monsters who need to be violently destroyed as quickly as possible. As such, Tomahawk BoneCritics like Carter posit that the Western horror story justifies the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Tomahawk BoneVillains are so far from human that it is not only excusable but necessary to eradicate them as quickly as possible.

How Bone Tomahawk’s Ending Was Received

The horror-western’s final moments received significant praise

2015 Tomahawk Bone was considered a triumph for director S. Craig Zahler, with few films before or since being able to so effectively blend the horror and western genres. Critical praise was nearly universal, with the film having a 91% critic score on Rotten tomatoes. Viewers overall were a little less forgiving (the film’s audience score is 74% comparatively), although criticism here tends to be from Western or horror fans who feel the film leans too heavily into either genre of the two. be your second preference.

When it comes to praise for the film, the ending of Tomahawk Bone unsurprisingly, it comes up a lot. It’s in the final scenes that the horror aspects of the story really come to the fore and that’s when the most harrowing moments occur. This did not go unnoticed by critics, and many highlighted the final moments where gunshots are heard in the distance, Hunt’s fate in the hands of the Trogladytes, to be among the best cymetic moments of 2015.

Reviews of the film also mention this problem, although not because there is a perceived flaw in it. Instead, critical responses state that pacing issues make the ending feel too abrupt. There’s no denying it Tomahawk Bone is slow, with the pacing and action multiplying by several magnitudes in just the latter parts of the third act. While many saw the sudden acceleration as an advantage, others found the roller coaster-like acceleration jarring.

Yet even then the focus seems to be on everything that precedes the Tomahawk Bone ending with a very slow pace, with the suggested solution being to speed up most of the film rather than slowing down the final scenes. Such opinions were few and far between among critics, and it is safe to say that the Tomahawk Bone the ending was seen as a strong point of Zahler’s film by most who saw it.