The Night of the Hunter
1955 · Directed by Charles Laughton
Original language: English
- crime
- drama
- thriller
The story
In Depression-era West Virginia, a serial-killing preacher hunts two young children who know the whereabouts of a stash of money.
What it’s like
Stark, stylised black-and-white with expressionist shadows: hard German-influenced lighting, bars of moonlight across dark water, and painted, almost storybook backdrops that give the Depression-era river country a dreamlike unreality. Compositions are rigorously framed and often symmetrical, with long lingering shots of children drifting down a river in a rowboat and owls, fields and fences rendered in silvery light. The score leans on a plaintive folk ballad, sung in the wind and the night, that gives the whole film a hymn-like hush. Its mood is haunted and fable-like, a nightmare told as a bedtime story, with a slow, deliberate pace and an unsettling tenderness beneath the dread. Violence is significant but mostly implied or brief, with several frightening sequences of menace and a murder shown in shadow rather than gore; the threat of a predatory adult toward children is the main source of fear, and the tone turns grim in its final act. It suits a late, quiet viewing for those drawn to classic noir atmosphere and old-fashioned gothic myth, and to viewers who can handle chilling, adult-level suspense.
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