Bone Tomahawk 

is the directorial debut of screenwriter and novelist S. Craig Zahler, who wrote the script in 2011.[9] Zahler had
previously completed more than forty original screenplays for Hollywood, including The Big Stone Grid, Conflicts of the Last
Progenitors, and The Brigands of Rattleborge, the last of which topped The Black List in 2006.[10][11] However, only one film was
produced: the 2011 low-budget horror film Asylum Blackout.[9][12]
Zahler had previously written four Westerns, making Bone Tomahawk his fifth work in the Western genre. Back in 2005, Zahler watched
nineteen films in two weeks at a Westerns festival at the Film Forum and, upon seeing a film he didn't like, began to think about how to
improve it in his own way; thereafter deciding to write novels and screenplays in the Western genre.[12][9] The concept of Bone
Tomahawk arose when Zahler's manager, producer, and friend Dallas Sonnier proposed he make a film adaption of his novel Wraiths of
the Broken Land directed by Zahler himself. However, Zahler believed the novel could not be adapted on a low budget and opted to
write a rescue Western, Bone Tomahawk, instead as a sibling piece to Wraiths of the Broken Land.[9][13] Zahler took satisfaction while
creating Bone Tomahawk, in preserving within the film much of the original script.[13] Bone Tomahawk was described by Alex Godfrey
of The Guardian as "A western with horror trimmings", but has been described by Zahler as just a direct Western, with references to lost
race fiction such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines.[9] Zahler incorporated some details of his personal life into the script,
remarking: "Most characters I write have some attributes in common with me, and some attributes that are not. Certainly when Brooder
says: ‘Smart men don’t get married’, everyone who knows me is thinking of me. ‘That’s something Zahler would say.’" and "I’m not
married and don’t have any interest in it."[9]