Search

The release of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained in 2012 has stirred a renewed interest in Western films. The film pays homage to the Italian sub-genre of Spaghetti Westerns and has the ambition to create a completely new genre, the “Southern”. This constitutes an important evolution in the history of the genre, especially after the transformation carried about by the “Eurowesterns” between the 1960s and the 1970s. In this paper I will consider the importance of the Italian and European Westerns in the development of the genre in recent times, both in Europe and the rest of the world. With its blending of American Western and Spaghetti Western, Django Unchained is an innovative contribution to a tradition started in the 1960s and, at the same time, an anticipation of a potential development of the genre.