For A Few Dollars More, Two Mules For Sister Sara, High Plains Drifter, Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact, Tightrope, A Perfect World, Gran Torino all have a rape or an attempted one.
Everything about High Plains Drifter feels like a fantasy. The unknown man riding into an isolated town with no apparent connection to the outside world, aside from the gang of cutthroats they are waiting to return from prison, who killed the sheriff being avenged? The town populated by stereotypes? The midget?
I could see High Plains Drifter being considered a horror film. And Pale Rider as well. About the only variation that Eastwood makes from Shane in that film is the inference that the Pale Rider is a ghost. Isn't he? He just fades away at the end of the film---or am I getting that mixed up with the end of High Plains Drifter?
So, now that it's been refreshed in my memory, yes, I would agree that High Plains Drifter is a horror film, or at the very least a gothic ghost story set in the old West. Eastwood fades away at the end of the film suggesting that he was an avenging spirit. And, with Eastwood's character having a back full of bullet holes in Pale Rider I think the same could be said of that film. Both films ...
OK, so I re-watched Clint's appearance on Inside The Actor's Studio last night (I own it on a DVD set). In the interview, Clint refers to High Plains Drifter as "allegorical". Also, (get ready Mike The Mook), he ACTUALLY DOES SAY (hahaha) that in the original script, his character was "clearly the sheriff's brother" and that he opted rather to "play it for ambiguity" and to "let the audience ...