Rosenbaum used the term "acid Western" to describe a "cherished counterculture dream" from the 1960s and 1970s "associated with people like Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Jim McBride, and Rudy Wurlitzer, as well as movies like Greaser's Palace.
[5] The film stars Will Hutchins, Warren Oates, and Jack Nicholson and was anonymously financed by Roger Corman.
The Shooting subverts the usual priorities of the Western to capture a sense of dread and uncertainty that characterized the counterculture of the late 1960s.
Screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer is considered "the individual most responsible for exploring this genre, having practically invented it himself in the late '60s and then helped to nurture it in the scripts of others", such as McBride's Glen and Randa, Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Cox's Walker, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
Rosenbaum calls Dead Man a "much-delayed fulfillment" of the acid Western, "formulating a chilling, savage frontier poetry to justify its hallucinated agenda.