Night of the Hunter: Clarity as Nightmare in the Fairy Tale of Heartland Americana
In 1955, veteran actor of stage and screen, Charles Laughton, delivered his feature film directorial debut to movie screens. It would, unfortunately for those of us who love movies, the the only one Laughton would direct. Night of the Hunter was savaged by critics and was a box office failure. Laughton, crushed by this, never sought to direct again.
Since then, Night of the Hunter has been “reappraised,” as they say. Those critics from 1955 have been found to have suffered from a poverty of mind and imagination. Laughton’s employment of German expressionism makes for a visually sumptuous, striking style conducive to the themes of the movie. There are certain shots and frames in the movie that can stand up with anything before or after in their ability to steer themselves into a viewers memory and consciousness. It’s been seventy years since the movie was released, and I’ve seen many thousands of movies, but every time I watch Night of the Hunter, there are moments my breath catches because of the images on screen.
Still, despite its visual beauty, nothing about the movie’s initial reception shocks me. As disappointed as I may be that I will never get to dive into a long list of films in Charles Laughton’s directorial filmography, I’m also a bit glad for him that Night of the Hunter was the only time he was subjected to the appraisal of the movie critics and audiences of his day. Laughton’s artistry deserved better, and we clearly weren’t capable of it. I have my suspicions about whether we're capable of it now.
The reappraisal of Night of the Hunter has been written and discussed in a way that makes it easy to write it off as simply “too artsy for a mainstream audience and critical press,” but that’s a cop out really.
Charles Laughton was English. Though the Brits maybe be the closest cultural cousins to us here in the US, there is still some distance between our cultures. Laughton had already made a legendary career in theater and movies, here in the US and in England. His experience with our movie business, our press and public was expansive within those environments. He understood the stories we told ourselves.
He was also either gay or bisexual, depending on which of his contemporaries was to be believed. Some attributed his marriage to Elsa Lanchester, a legend in her own right for performances in Witness for the Prosecution and playing the titular Bride of Frankenstein, was alleged by some to have been what we’d now refer to as a “beard.” Some alleged the marriage was meant to hide the fact that Laughton was gay. Others contended Laughton loved and adored Lanchester, and that he was in fact bisexual.
Which of these one believes doesn’t change that being both a Brit and queer, successful in business of moviemaking in the US made Laughton an insider with an outsider’s perspective. This would make him capable of seeing the stories Americans told ourselves, about ourselves, from a few degrees of separation, outside the norm. This perspective on the stories we told ourselves, specifically about The Heartland, the origin of and source of what we think of now as Americana, the depth and breadth of craftsmanship Laughton brought to it, and that it was made within the American studio system, are what makes Night of the Hunter an essential and important work in the history of American movies, and to my mind at least, an essential work of American horror.
There’s been a good deal written about the fairy tale nature of the movies narrative framing (also maintained in its visual style), as being responsible for a critical and public confusion that produced such a scathing response. That only really tracks, only really makes sense, if the conception one is working from only recognizes the American fairy tales and Disney-fied American versions of the older, darker fairy tales that began as folk tales in Europe, and I don’t buy that the film critics of the time wouldn’t have been aware of those. Like Laughton himself, those darker, more brutal versions of the most well known fairy tales would likely have been part of their childhoods. Though here in the US, they’d have been mixed with the sunnier, more optimistic folk tales of John Henry, Johnny Appleseed, and George Washington’s cherry tree, all part of the vision of The Heartland as the source and setting of the Americana even now being sold by that particularly vicious and virulent far right movement from which the manosphere and the tradwife movement stems. Walt Disney created a dynasty by transferring that optimistic, self assured righteousness onto the old fairy tales, while retaining their reassurance of cultural norms for children and women. In both the Disney’s versions and those older, darker versions, children were expected to be extensions of their parents will, and women with ambition or power were a danger to all children, and maybe girls most especially.
Take this, and the fact that the Hays Code was still the regime of censorship in Hollywood, and we have an explanation about why Night of the Hunter was so poorly received, as well as why there is a question about why a movie whose story centers on a serial killer attempting to extort ten thousand dollars from children is a horror movie. The Hays Code hamstrung the artistic and narrative possibilities of the US movie industry, and horror most of all, due to the fact that it is the genre which is most interested in the darkness within humanity, including the people and culture of the United States when it was being made here. The Hays Code insured it was impossible to directly comment on or present anything that might contradict a particularly Christian view of America and humanity more generally. When you read The Hays Code, it is the kind of document which makes undeniable the connection between the socially conservative Christianity of its day (neurotic in its racism, sexism and homophobia) and American Exceptionalism.
Instead of using that fairy tale framework and atmosphere to uphold this vision of Heartland Americana, Night of the Hunter inverts it, and uses it to create a fairy tale of its own, indicting what the dominant social and cultural view for what it refuses to acknowledge. It’s likely this is what Laughton sees, as the result of having spent so much of his life and career being alongside, but outside of that cultural view, while having to reckon with it in his work as an artist. It’s the difference between how we want to see ourselves, how we are taught to see ourselves, and what is apparent to anyone who hasn’t had their sense of who they are, and what the United States is shaped by the fairy tale of Heartland Americana Laughton is indicting. He interrogates what was, at the time, the dominant sense of self identity in the United States, though it was in the process of being replaced with a different kind of utopian vision in the Suburban Utopia Mythology. They have in common the assumption of righteousness and order producing safety, while ignoring the vulnerability they create. The setting itself is changed, as is the audience meant to recognize themselves as the default, and therefore dominant, American self identity.
There’s a degree to which Night of the Hunter creates a funhouse mirror effect. It's presenting us with something we think is going to be familiar, as plain as the person we see in the mirror everyday. What we see isn’t that familiar vision though, and I think more than anything, this is the explanation for the response to it when it was released. What this funhouse mirror presents, is what the fairy tale of Heartland Americana is created, at least in part, to hide. Laughton recognizes that fairy tale, that mythology, as one we choose to see, as well as recognizing what we choose not to see.
Caustic as it may be, Night of the Hunter was just too honest a work of fiction, and apparently still is. It’s why we search for answers about its rejection in its style, aesthetics and tone. It’s a sociopolitical work that is clear, but not didactic. In fact, it's fairy tale narrative creates something poetic and this leaves the variety of critic, academic and audience that refuses to engage with the sociopolitical nature of storytelling, except the most blatant, in a tough bind. Instead of admitting how scathing Night of the Hunter is in its perspective on and perception of some of the myths most dear and central to the American identity, questions about its fairy tale structure and style have to be invented. It has to be treated as “too aesthetically, stylistically and thematically complicated." This must be why such a shockingly cohesive, fully conceived artistic statement would be so thoroughly rejected, right? Even today, there’s a good portion of the critical community who basically say, “It was too artsy for those rubes back in 1955” because of the difficult position it puts them in to ask if maybe the rubes did get it, but they found its truths too offensive to engage with. Part of what makes a rube a rube, after all, is denying a clear truth they’re presented with, whether that ignorance is organic as the result of their experience and environment or its willfully self imposed. Are we, today, any less the rubes if we don’t consider maybe it wasn’t the stylistic nature of Night of the Hunter that rubbed so many so raw?
Its German Expressionist style points to part of what the movie is doing too. Its sharp contrasts between light and dark are in line thematically with the way it highlights the dark side of that Heartland Americana in its critique. In essence, Night of the Hunter is a scathing indictment of the environment that produces the rube who’d believe in that mythology, that fairy tale of Heartland Americana. In this, it also sweeps away the part individualism plays, because everyone, except the most benevolent of its characters, are either playing the part they believe is there’s in the order of that fairy tale or manipulating the faith everyone around them has in it. It's choosing to only see the light, and in so doing, erasing or ignoring the darkness that exists. Night of the Hunter brings to the fore the vulnerability and danger this creates. It recognizes a trap for both women and children being as true and real as anything the fairy tale of Heartland Americana might be honest about. It recognizes there is a deadly, as well as emotional and intellectual/cognitive cost for faith in that fairy tale. It’s a poison, a corruption of the human being, that in its totality can be described as spiritual.
The corruption, the poison Night of the Hunter is illuminating doesn’t come from an apple or the spindle of a spinning wheel. It’s an infection really, transmitted via words and whispers, as well as the deeds of the people around us, dripped into our ears to make sense of what our eyes see, from the time we’re children until we go to a Great Beyond or a Great Nothing. It’s an infection that pervades us wholly, and it influences who we are, because of the way it influences who we think we can become, by telling us our place in this fairy tale of an American Heartland, as a patriarchal, Christian utopia.
To speak of the spiritual and the Christian, in relation to Night of the Hunter, brings us to the character of Harry Powell. Not only is Harry Powell one of those unique and wonderful examples of as perfect a match of actor and role as can be found, the degree the character is made of real stuff, the things we choose not see, his camouflage within that Heartland Americana fairy tale. The fairy tale is fashioned from the belief some righteous strength of character is bequeathed to us by some magical combination of geography, tradition and God or fate. When combined with Robert Mitchum’s performance of it, how well Powell understands the camouflage the fairy tale creates, Night of the Hunter gives us one of the most profoundly disturbing villains in the history of American movies, because of just how real he is. He’s been made, spent his life in, the shadows of what the fairy tale chooses to illuminate.
He is simultaneously a product and manipulator of that fairy tale. It’s strongly intimated he is, essentially, a serial killer. He targets widows, the women who have no man to belong to in this patriarchal order. He is the meeting place of self righteousness, violence and greed which are so often referred to or treated as threads, but are more accurately described as central to the support structure that makes US history and the hierarchies within it possible. Powell moves through the world as if, according to his faith, this is how things should be, so do the majority of characters around him, and the central reason Night of the Hunter was so viciously received, is that in 1955 so did we, and we still do today.
Harry Powell is the distillation of American masculinity at the nexus of evangelical determinism, Protestant individualism, capitalism’s myth of the “self made man” and the patriarchal hierarchy that all of them rely on. The profoundly disturbing thing about Powell, and Mitchum’s performance, is how little exaggeration there is to him.
Powell understands himself as part of the natural order, and he’s not exactly wrong, because the order around him has always had a place for him. In his individual belief, this is God’s Will. In that order, the predator is righteous, and it is his duty to prey on sin and weakness, which are one in the same. To his mind, he is chosen for and because of his desire for predation, and in turn, all he does is excused in service of it. If there is exaggeration of the character it's only in how primary his lust for murder is the sole satisfaction of his sense of purpose. Though there are certainly many men in history who fit this description, they are not the most common variety. They are the most extreme end of a spectrum we call benign, and is anything but. The “order” of patriarchy certainly produces them. The more common variety is also sadistic, venal and morally empty, and their shared belief in predation as salvation takes a different form. It is a continuous, never ending emotional, psychological, often physical abuse and domination. Their ambition creates a scope great enough to call it an abuse that affects their victims so wholly, it too can be called spiritual. Their victims sin is to never be able to wholly embody submission to this abuse as they envision, the real sin in the predators eyes, and so are in need of the punishment, retribution and the progressive effort to control and dominate. Powell wants to rid the world of this sin, and his righteousness is affirmed by murder. For the more common variety of man Powell represents, the last thing they want is for those over whom they demonstrate this control and domination by way of abuse, is to be free of it, even if its in death. In our more common variety, control and domination is the sign of righteousness, and therefore the promise of salvation. They do often end up killing their victims, because there can never be a submission as whole as they need. Their faith in salvation via predation, because it means a lifetime of submission so whole no human being could embody it, will lead to death anyway. They can't admit submission can never be completely whole, and if they can’t demonstrate an ever advancing, evolving dominance and control, it is a weakness within them, which would then make their victimization not just excusable, but necessary.
Harry Powell could be transplanted to a few hundred years before Night of the Hunter, and live comfortably as a witch hunter for the Church. He could be transplanted to contemporary America, and he’d be a successful social media influencer, a conservative activist of some variety, a Senator or a Congressman, and no one would blink if he was included among the roster of Epstein associates and clients. He could, in fact, be president. What is particular to Harry Powell are the tools available to him, which are the product of the time, place and class that are the movies setting.
Shelley Winters Willa Harper, becomes victim to Harry Powell because she, and everyone around her, have faith in the fairy tale of Heartland Americana. They believe it. Powell gets the opportunity to be her executioner, because she is expected to have a minder, a keeper, an owner really. She gives herself over to this, willingly and with the expectation it will provide something in the realm of stability for herself and her children. And let’s not be coy here, at no point in our history has being recognized as a “good Christian” husband precluded said husband from abusing his wife and children in whatever way he sees fit. One might say that ended in the seventies with the successes second wave feminism achieved, but that is the blindness of American Exceptionalism, which Heartland Americana is foundational to, and part of. We might have made it somewhat less convoluted and complicated for a woman to escape abuse, but we have at no time, seriously made any attempt to understand what is necessary to stop producing men who see predation as salvation and self protection. That’s a result, in no small part, of our deeply lopsided and inequitable understanding of “religious freedom.” If Powell had been content to beat and terrorize Willa Harper and her children, he would have broken no laws or norms. Willa Harper understands her role in the Heartland Americana narrative, she understands the cost of not playing it, but she pays the ultimate cost for playing it too.
Ben Harper, her husband and father to her children (played by a very young Peter Graves), has died in his attempt to fill his role in this fairy tale mythology. The looming threat of failing in it, failing to fulfill his place in the “natural order” as provider (which is also protector) drives him to robbery, and a man is killed, resulting in Harper being sentenced to death. It’s during his incarceration, and the result of his expressing his desperation to fill that role, Harry Powell comes to understand there is something to be gained, in the form of ten thousand dollars, by terrorizing Willa Harper and their children.
It’s notable that Night of the Hunter doesn’t save all its scathing criticism for men in the maintenance and preservation of this patriarchal fairy tale order. It’s another woman, Evelyn Varden’s Icey Spoons, that is the character acting as both comic relief and the one who is the vocal example of faith in that fairy tale order. The comedy in her performance stems from the complete lack of self reflection in her character. She exists as a tool of faith. Faith in a Christian God, is only part of that order, and its the order she really has faith in. She plays a busy body, know it all character that was popular in many films of the period, but she is the voice of “appropriate” social norms, the voice of order as primary concern. She questions little except in the form of gossip about who is violating that order, and how. At no point does she seem to think of Willa or the Harper children as more than pieces to fit into place within that order or Harry Powell as anything other than the “good Christian man” Powell knows is one of the most important roles in that fairy tale. To Icey Spoons, all the people around her are is what represent in the fairy tale of Heartland Americana.
The last third of the movie is when it announces that it’s been engaging with, and treating the fantasy of the American Heartland, as a fairy tale. The children, who’ve existed in the movie up to that point to show the degree the order of that utopian fiction is a threat to women and children, take to the river, and there’s an extend scene of the children, floating down the river, singing a song, marveling at the beauty of a natural world that’s been absent from everything prior.
The bulk of the criticism of Night of the Hunter has always cited this last third as the major reason for it’s initial reception, and confusion with this scene in particular. It seems quite clear to me, it’s a scene about transition. The children are making the transition from our fairy tale, the fairy tale of Heartland Americana, to one of their own. And the differences between the two, maybe especially in comparison to the fairy tales of old that were designed to support the social norms that are the patriarchal order of this Heartland Americana, couldn’t be more clear. Powell, we see is in pursuit, and he too has passes out of the fairy tale he understands and manipulates the order of.
The river (the real hero of the movie) ferries the children into the care of Rachel Cooper, played by screen legend Lillian Gish. Cooper is a widow who’s taken in a number of orphaned children. It should be noted that what is presented as a small, picturesque American town is producing this number of orphans is itself a comment on what we choose not to see, as at no point has we seen or heard any mention of this. It’s also notable that Rachel Cooper exists in this place the river takes the children to, obviously some distance from their home and the town center. She’s an older woman, existing separate from the order. In those old, darker, more brutal fairy tales, Cooper would either have been a witch or a queen in her secluded castle, the danger the children must contend with.
The picture we get of Cooper and the order she keeps for these children, is one much more akin to matriarchy. Despite popular belief that matriarchy would be just trading women for men in the leadership positions the patriarchy has created and maintained, a matriarchy exists on a different set of fundamental values. Matriarchy isn’t concerned with the preservation of order, and the power it creates, as its primary goal. Instead, it’s concerned with raising children into adults who have been cared for, loved, treated as if they have value, and will be emotionally, psychologically and if we take the concept of spiritual to mean the sum of the many pieces we are, spiritually healthy, so those children will become adults who treat the society they belong to in kind. It's a difference between creating the capacity for care, instead of terrorizing them into compliance. Gish’s Rachel Cooper is the first character in the movie to treat the well being of the children as an end in itself, worthy of pursuing. Cooper and the children exist outside the order that’s given Powell the power to put these children at risk. Prior to Cooper, all of the adults are concerned with the “order” of that Heartland Americana fairy tale, ensuring everyone plays their role in it, and the faith in the order it produces renders them blind to the danger for Willa Harper and the Harper children.
Part of the criticism of this last section of the movie comes from Rachel Cooper, sending Powell yelping, on the run after firing a shotgun at him. She isn't fooled by Powell at all, because she actually just speaks to the Harper children, and listens. No other adult, up to that point, has done anything like this. Powell has spent the night outside the house, attempting to menace Cooper and the children. She is not menaced, and she has no need for a man to protect her. Powell's yelping escape is criticized as too comedic compared to the tone of the rest of the movie. But Powell has left the world whose order gave him the camouflage he needed, a world that is indifferent to the consequences it creates for women and children. Here, in the world of Rachel Cooper's matriarchy, where the well being of children is paramount, where Powell is recognized for the con artist he is, he is a small, pitiful, absurd fool. Harry Powell has no power in this world, this fairy tale children might themselves dream up in response to the one they’ve left. The menacing, shark like con man we’ve seen navigating the patriarchal order of Heartland Americana, becomes no different than Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Same or Sylvester the cat.
This is in keeping with the degree Icey Spoons, the voice of Heartland Americana as the order of safety, security and stability, has been played for comedy. Night of the Hunter is making clear, one must be a fool to put so much faith in those promises to become blind to the realities they create.
In this, Night of the Hunter is attempting to ask its audience, through its expert technical and storytelling craftsmanship, to confront that the order of this patriarchal fantasy makes fools of us all. It claims to prioritize the safety of women and children, and provides the exact opposite, by instead erasing the threat and vulnerability it creates. The only time it responds is when that hypocrisy is in danger of being exposed. It’s self interested performance of interest in order, care or safety, is no different than Harry Powell at worst or Icey Spoons at best. We are either buying into the idea of predation as salvation or being its useful idiot, using the soft power of social proximity to uphold and enforce the order that makes a place for the Harry Powell’s of the world.
In 1955, the fantasy of Heartland Americana Night of the Hunter is so scathing in its critique of, was a dominant American identity, so it’s not particularly surprising the critics of the time would be vicious and audiences would be indifferent toward it. The process of transferring the dominance of the fairy tale mythology of Heartland American to the Suburban Utopia myth had begun, but wasn’t yet complete. Suburban Utopia Mythology would replace the idea of southern and midwestern rural life as the dominant identity in American culture. William Faulkner’s work would take aim at the social order created by Southern aristocracy, but Faulkner saw rot through and through, a complete and total corruption it never really names. Night of the Hunter is clear about the heart, the source of that corruption being the fairy tales and mythology of patriarchal order.
It's a scathing indictment of indifference to cruelty and violence, wrapped in a fairy tale, subverting the spirit of the Hays Code, while still sticking to its letter. The reaction to it, in 1955 and through to today, provides a map of how the belief in the order of patriarchy is a self indictment. The hostility it was met with, has over decades been replaced with the kind of intellectual dishonesty that will recognize pieces, but never admit to the whole they add up to. The argument has been made that this is objectivity. There’s some truth to the idea that this is a kind of legacy, a kind of intellectual and perceptual hangover from the how long that direct, uncamouflaged hostility toward any interrogation of patriarchy was the norm. It's incomplete though, as if these are the remnants, and we’ve come to have new norms where it isn’t acceptable to respond to the interrogation of patriarchy with outright, naked hostility, violence and the personal, professional and often physical destruction of those who dare.
Should you believe that, I’d point you to the social media accounts of anyone in public life, in any capacity, who has been so bold, man, woman or otherwise, and the last fifteen years of American history.
Charles Laughton’s artistic aspirations were a casualty of the exact refusal to see that his movie as indicting. He understood too well, it would be simple and easy for the audience to deny seeing Harry Powell in themselves, and in making Icey Spoon’s blind faith Powell’s de facto accomplice, prevents so easy an escape. Laughton's authorial voice, as an insider with an outsider's perspective, was silenced because of what it revealed.
We’re still not sending the Harry Powell’s of the world yelping and hollering as they run for cover, attempting to avoid a good dose of buckshot. We’re electing the Harry Powell's of today president, making them the richest men in the world, and falling as foolishly to the same blindness Night of the Hunter is an indictment of.