The Night of the Hunter (1955)

A weird psychosexual religious allegorical nightmare. One of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen.

Walked into a packed Tuesday night screening at the Alamo with no idea what I was getting into. Walked out completely floored.

The cinematography, the lighting, the sets - that river sequence is enormous, and I have no idea how they built it. The underwater shot of the mother with her throat slit, hair drifting slowly in the current, is jaw-dropping. Just incredible imagery throughout.

Robert Mitchum gives an absolutely terrifying performance as the literal devil. I got big gay vibes from his character - the crazy stance on sex, the performative masculinity hiding something else underneath. Given Charles Laughton’s sexuality in real life, I’m not surprised that’s coming through. The movie has a complicated relationship with desire and repression that feels deeply personal.

This is a great prey vs. predator film, and it all clicked for me in the final act. The second act also gave me big Home Alone energy - the kids squaring off against Mitchum’s preacher. I said what I said.

The theater was cracking up at parts, which surprised me. I wish I could put myself in the headspace of a 1955 audience, because reading reviews from the time, people treated this as a shocking horror nightmare with no value. They were so wrong. It’s funny, it’s scary, it’s beautiful.

References to this film are everywhere, and seeing the source material is electric. Spike Lee pulled the LOVE/HATE tattoo imagery directly for Do the Right Thing. The flowing hair and fairy tale darkness feels very Guillermo del Toro - Pan’s Labyrinth owes something to this. Terrence Malick’s golden hour pastoral shots echo the riverbank sequences. The Coen Brothers’ Preacher in True Grit feels like a direct descendant of Mitchum’s performance. Even Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake with De Niro draws heavily from Mitchum’s menace here.

It’s a thriller, gothic horror, true crime novel adaptation, and Southern fairy tale all at once. Such a strange movie, but it works completely. It’s a bummer this was Laughton’s only film as a director. The man made one movie. It’s a masterpiece. That’s insane.

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