When Clint Eastwood directed Westerns, he challenged his audience to think deeper. On the outside, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and High Plains Drifter were old-school Westerns with pistols and horses designed to entertain a wide audience and they do. As an actor, no one embodied the wonder and peril of the old West quite like Eastwood, and he quickly established himself as the John Wayne of his generation. Rather than replicating Wayne's stalwart heroism and totemic ideals, Eastwood's Western protagonists, or anti-heroes in his case, were ominous figures abstract in their desires and motivations. No Western of his displayed a more spiritual outlaw than his original revisionist film, High Plains Drifter, whose anonymously named "The Stranger" is believed to be an apparition.