Love & Hate, Seventy Years of "The Night of the Hunter"

No other film bridges the sacred and the profane quite like Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), a Depression-era fairy tale that ends one cinematic age and inaugurates another, painted in all the shades of nostalgia Norman Rockwell left out when depicting the past. Part noir, part parable, it is a story of flight and faith, innocence, and inheritance, revealing the uneasy marriage between American piety and spectacle — a theme that would echo throughout postwar cinema. The odds are that it’s a favorite film of your favorite director and most certainly of your film-loving friends.

Viewed through the eyes of two children fleeing a “false prophet” of a father figure, “The Night of the Hunter” unfolds like a Grimm’s fairy tale set in the American South. In a time of poverty and want, a corrupt preacher named Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) marries a widow (Shelley Winters) to find money stolen by her husband, hoping to provide a better life for their children, only to see them hunted. The children, John and Pearl, drift down a moonlit river to escape the murderous “Preacher,” finding refuge with a farm woman, Rachel Cooper (silent-era icon Lillian Gish), who protects strays. One moment, the camera lingers on pastoral calm, frogs and rabbits watching as the children float downstream, and the next, it submerges us in a nightmare; a drowned mother tethered in a sunken Model T, her hair drifting like river grass. It marks the film’s convergence of traditions, Expressionist nightmare meeting American folklore, as Laughton directs with the precision of Murnau and the heart of an American mythmaker.

Laughton and cinematographer Stanley Cortez constructed a world where every shot feels remembered rather than filmed. Drawing from silent-era technique, even letting the camera roll until the reel ran out, they built a visual language both archaic and experimental. Cortez filled the screen with inkblack shadows and white-hot light, carving faces into masks, transforming barns, bedrooms, and riverbanks into mythic spaces. He later said he was “using darkness to reveal rather than conceal.”

If noir once belonged to the doomed and the desperate, “The Night of the Hunter” marks its archetypal evolution. Powell’s evil thrives not in secrecy but in spectacle; his sermons crafted for those who want belief neatly packaged as truth. “The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us,” he boasts, revealing the private gospel of a self-made prophet. He knows that people prefer the comfort of conviction to the labor of understanding — and it’s in that comfort that his power takes root, flowering beneath the cross he wields like a weapon. The result is hypnotic and horrifying in equal measure, a performance that reverberates through film history — inspiring Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger and countless others.

When Mitchum raised his tattooed hands and delivered the parable of love and hate, he inscribed one of the most enduring gestures in motion-picture history; an image revisited more than thirty years later in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989), linking two American parables across generations. The “Love” and “Hate” monologue, delivered by Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell in “The Night of the Hunter,” became one of cinema’s most potent symbols of moral duality. In Lee’s 1989 film, the character Radio Raheem (played by Bill Nunn) pays direct homage to that moment, wearing brass knuckles engraved with the same words and reenacting Powell’s sermon almost wordfor-word, transforming it from a Southern Gothic parable into a street side meditation on violence and survival.

The film itself drifts between tones, veering from terror to wonder, often within the same scene. That dynamic range would later become a hallmark of American cinema. You can trace its DNA through the tonal dualities of “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), and the suburban surrealism of David Lynch; in 1955, such fluidity between nightmare and lullaby was almost unheard of. For all its poetry, the film remains grounded in distinctly American anxieties. Released in the wake of McCarthyism, it plays as a parable of the enemy within, a false shepherd infiltrating a suffering community and turning piety into panic. In the barn doorway, Mitchum’s silhouette sings to the moon, and noir’s urban shadows spill into the countryside, widening into something older and more mythic. The kind of darkness that feels both moral and divine.

When “The Night of the Hunter” premiered, audiences and critics didn’t know what to make of it. Some dismissed it as grotesque, others as confused. It was Laughton’s only film as a director; he never directed again. Yet time clarified its brilliance. By the 1960s, French critics recognized it as visionary, and by 1992, it was preserved in the National Film Registry. Reportedly deeply affected by the film’s reception, Charles Laughton passed away not long after its release. The Temporal Screen reserves a soft spot for those creators who did not live to receive the flowers time would send, especially those who would have benefited from the societal freedoms and identity expression we have only now begun to honor. If the sympathetic vibrations from our celebration of his monumental work adjust the balance, I think we can consider this a Noirvember well spent; better still, if film discoveries by first-time viewers in the present are to follow.

Seventy years on, “The Night of the Hunter” endures — knowing the darkness behind the brightest daylight. Between film eras past and those still to come, it stands as a bridge between expressionism and modern myth, handed down, recommended highly, and treasured in each age as both warning and wonder: the hands of love and hate are visible, but seldom are they seen.