The film starts as a story about finding the family farm, the old dream of the homestead, the West that became the first frontier of the American empire. But it quickly becomes a fright tale that questions the sanity of any audience that would watch it and, by extension, the sanity of anyone who would believe the western fantasy of deserts inexplicably fecund and settlers moving peacefully across the landscapes, covered wagons like little puffs of cloud drifting along in an orderly row with the breeze of the American dream nudging them along.
