Pale Rider is the only time in Clint Eastwood’s career that he played a supernatural character. Clint Eastwood built his career on his appearances in Western, beginning with the TV series Rawhide. His work in Sergio Leone’s Dollars movie trilogy not only cemented his stardom but also helped establish the spaghetti Western genre too. In the years, that followed, Eastwood made many more Westerns, including Two Mules For Sister Sara, The Outlaw Josey Wales and later signed off on the genre with Unforgiven – though 2021’s Cry Macho is a neo-Western.
Pale Rider follows Eastwood’s mysterious “Preacher,” who arrives in a small town to help a family being terrorized by a greedy mining company. Pale Rider is essentially Eastwood’s riff on 1952 classic Shane and even features a similiar finale. While it has all the tropes of a typical Eastwood Western, it has a noticeable supernatural edge to it too. Pale Rider heavily hints that Preacher is a supernatural being of some kind, and Eastwood himself would later confirm this in an interview at ClintEastwood.net, calling Preacher an “out and out ghost.”
Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider Character Explained
Eastwood Was Drawn To The Biblical Parallells Of Preacher
Pale Rider stands out among Clint Eastwood movies as the only time he’s played a supernatural character, and one of the few occasions he’s experimented with horror as a genre. Eastwood rarely dipped his toes in the horror genre throughout his career, but he claimed he wanted to explore the mythology and biblical implications of Pale Rider’s hero. Pale Rider makes several biblical references throughout — with the title itself referencing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with Death riding a “pale horse” — and Eastwood’s Preacher is shown to have six bullet wounds in his back.
Pale Rider is thus Clint Eastwood’s only confirmed supernatural character, which adds an intriguing texture to the story.
Pale Rider supporting character Marshal Stockburn later claims to have killed him too, as Preacher wipes out the evildoers in the town during the finale. However, While Preacher might be a supernatural character, the movie still features a relatively grounded tone, and he never displays any overt ghosty abilities.
Pale Rider feels like something of a spiritual sequel to Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, where he plays another mysterious stranger who arrives in a rundown town to seek revenge. In the movie’s original script, it was made clear Eastwood’s – who has turned down many famous roles — Stranger was the brother of the town’s murdered sheriff, but the director decided to make this more ambiguous, implying The Stranger was really the sheriff’s spirit seeking revenge.
However, High Plains Drifter never clarifies this, with Eastwood wanting audiences to make up their own minds. Pale Rider is thus Clint Eastwood’s only confirmed supernatural character, which adds an intriguing texture to the story. It’s a shame Pale Rider didn’t play up this subtext a little more, but given that Eastwood has little interest in horror, maybe it was best he played to his strengths.
This Unique Clint Eastwood Film Is One Of His Best
Pale Rider Stands Out For More Reasons Than Preacher Being A Ghost
While Pale Rider may stand out as something of an oddity among Clint Eastwood’s many movies, it’s also inarguably one of his best. Even though Preacher is a vengeful spirit, and Pale Rider is something of a supernatural horror-western rather than a gritty crime drama or a hard-hitting Spaghetti Western like the Dollars trilogy, both the movie and character are beloved by Clint Eastwood fans. Pale Rider still has a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 83% audience rating, for example.
While Preacher may be the only supernatural character played by Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider shows that he could have experimented more with fantastical elements in his incredibly grounded movies
It’s not only in retrospect that Pale Rider has been a success either, as the movie performed incredibly well at the box office when it released in 1985. Pale Rider landed over $41 million at the box-office against a budget of $6.9 million (via Box Office Mojo), making it one of the most successful Westerns of the 1980s.
The religious subtext in Pale Rider is seen as particularly noteworthy, though even without the supernatural elements, it stands as an incredibly solid Western and a highlight of Clint Eastwood’s career as both an actor and director. While Preacher may be the only supernatural character played by Clint Eastwood, Pale Rider shows that he could have experimented more with fantastical elements in his incredibly grounded movies and still been highly successful.