Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)

King has given the origin of this series many times and it is two things: Browning's poem for the title, and Leone's film for everything else. Roland is the Man with No Name, transplanted whole. A near-silent gunslinger in a duster crossing an enormous empty landscape after a goal he will not explain, in a world where the institutions have collapsed and the surviving technology is a gun. King has said explicitly that he wanted to write a story with the scope of Tolkien and the feel of a Sergio Leone western. The Dark Tower is the answer to that sentence.

Tarantino has never hidden this one and the film quotes it openly:

• Morricone is used directly on the soundtrack, not imitated
• The extreme close-up on eyes before a killing, held far past comfort
• A standoff staged in a cemetery, which is where Leone's ends
• Chapter headings and a revenge list, so the plot is a structure rather than a mystery

What Tarantino changes is the genre underneath: Leone's grammar applied to a Japanese sword film, which is itself where Leone got A Fistful of Dollars from.