SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Adam McGovern
October 18, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER | d. CHARLES LAUGHTON | 1955

What doesn’t scare you to death, makes you stronger. And I was never as scared as when I first saw The Night of the Hunter at age nine.

Set in the Depression-era South, Robert Mitchum plays a smooth-talking serial killer who poses as a preacher, charming small towns and leaving a trail of murdered women married briefly for their money. When he ends up in jail for a minor offense, he meets a condemned convict who robbed a bank and killed two men out of desperation to provide for his family, whom the preacher then finds, marrying and murdering the mom (Shelly Winters) and hounding the two kids to find out where their dad hid $10,000. The kids, John and Pearl (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce, both haunting in their own way) then have to go on the run, in a surreal trip up a West Virginia river in a tiny skiff by night.

For years I only remembered the movie from this point, where it essentially becomes the goth Wizard of Oz; the image of Winters’ murdered body, tied to a sunken car with her hair waving in terrible beauty at the bottom of the same river, escaped me. I guess kids really do block out the parts they don’t understand or can’t yet deal with. The film is filled with grownup horrors, like the suggestibility of the smalltown mob (with the real-life McCarthy era just waning), the preacher’s stern sexual repression and shaming of his trapped spouse (at a time when the famous filmmaker had to stay closeted), the overall claustrophobia of traditionalist America.

There was still plenty for me to be terrified by, as the preacher pursues John and Pearl, trotting calmly and methodically from town to town on a stolen white horse and announcing himself with a hymn he sings that works better than any ogre’s tread to let us know that death is closing in. This specter of patriarchal wrath meets a paragon of maternal protection, Miss Cooper (Lillian Gish), who runs what we’d now call a group home of displaced and abandoned children roaming the disintegrated society of the 1930s, and takes in the two kids.

Gish, an angel from cinema’s earliest days, quotes humble scripture to her charges, suffering them to come unto her unlike the vengeful preacher. But she’s really a herald of the future; nonjudgmental of the dawning sexuality and dumb choices of the oldest girl in her care, who she promises to raise as a “strong, fine woman”; monologuing about the wisdom of the young like some prophet of the counterculture that was decades off.

Mitchum is the long shadow of the past, of authority and misogyny masqueraded as a moral code and natural order. That shadow had a lot further left to stretch when this movie (rejected in its day, revered now) was made, and if as Joyce wrote history is a nightmare we’re trying to awaken from, this film was made in mid-nightmare. Watching it in adulthood with many of those shadows looming again, I understand what not to be afraid of, and how not to fall asleep.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

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