It’s been ages since I’ve seen tonight’s Creeptober film, The Night of the Hunter. It’s been so long that the movie felt completely fresh to me, and I was moved once again by how well-made this film is.
Reacting to The Night of the Hunter
The thing that impresses me the most about The Night of the Hunter is how effectively frightening it is. It blends various related genres in such a way that when the terror strikes, it hits hard.
In the beginning, The Night of the Hunter feels mostly like a crime thriller or a film noir. When we first meet Robert Mitchum’s character, Harry Powell, he is creepy, but he’s not quite scary in a way I’d associate with horror. Then, when he starts to sink his claws into Willa, the tension begins to rise, quickly.
The plot progresses at such a surprising speed that when the first truly horrific thing happens, it’s quite a shock. I think most viewers will have a good idea of how the initial plot threads will progress. Harry will ingratiate himself with Willa, Pearl, and the town at large, and he’ll gradually work on John to wear him down enough to tell him where the money is. This understanding also leads to certain expectations, and when those expectations are seen to their conclusion much quicker than we might anticipate, it makes the rest of the movie feel unpredictable and exponentially more suspenseful.
What I mean by all of this is, it feels like the sequences in the middle of the movie would be the logical climax of just about any other film. Harry killing Willa, her body being found in the river, and the terrifying scene of Harry taking John and Pearl into the cellar would make a great finale. But when those scenes are done, there’s still forty minutes left to go! It’s a testament to incredible pacing and masterful storytelling that it feels like so much story is packed into the 90-minute run time, and nothing feels rushed or underdeveloped.
I also love how beautifully The Night of the Hunter is filmed. The influences of the visual side of the storytelling appear, to me, to come from noir, but also horror. John standing in his bedroom at night when Harry’s shadow looms over him feels like a direct nod to the German Expressionism of classic horror and film noir. So too do the looming house and barn, stylized and silhouetted in the night as John and Pearl float up to Rachel Cooper’s land.
There appear to be allusions to monster movies as well. The shot of Harry reaching up the stairs of the cellar as the kids flee for their lives feels like a moment out of a classic monster film. Even the lynch mob at the end of the film, with their torches in hand, appear to be a reference to the mobs of villagers seen in many creature classics of the 1930s and 1940s. There is no doubt, Harry Powell is a monster.
Watching The Night of the Hunter this time, I also noticed a couple of shots that seem to reference paintings. I don’t know if this is true or not, and in the little research I did between watching the movie just now and writing this reaction, I couldn’t find anything to confirm it. But here’s a theory anyway. There is a shot during the picnic scene that reminds me of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte painted by Georges Seurat. The shot is when Harry has his foot on the log while talking to Willa, and in the foreground we see a couple sitting on the ground with an umbrella. The allusion feels intentional to me.
Another scene much later in the movie also feels like an allusion to a painting. When Mrs. Cooper is sitting up at night with a shotgun on her lap, the image of her reminds me of Whistler’s Mother (aka Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1) by painter James McNeill Whistler. Maybe that’s not the intention, but it feels like it is to me. And even if I’m simply looking too hard for connections, it still points to the fact that The Night of the Hunter looks beautiful.
It really is a beautiful movie through and through. It’s scary, it’s meaningful, and it’s moving. The Night of the Hunter is a true work of art.
