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"The Night of the Hunter" is now rightfully considered a bona fide classic of post-war Hollywood, but its evocative cinematography and offbeat touches received a cool response from the critics and audiences of 1955. Its intentionally anomalous rejection of the rigidity and strictures of cinematic visual storytelling were woefully misunderstood, and due to its esoteric unconventionality, it was perceived as melodramatic and stilted. Indefinable and defiant, the film was viewed as a failure of its time, unfairly maligned until a resurgence of new Hollywood auteurs universally recognised it as an influence; the contemporaneous critical analysis was even more positive, further renewing interest in the film as a wrongly scorned masterpiece deserving of veneration. In 1992, the film's reappraisal led to its induction into the National Film Registry as a culturally and artistically significant landmark, securing its revived status for future generations.
Ostensibly a fairy-tale remixed with elements of Film Noir and Southern Gothic, the film recalls the silent era with its lyrical, expressionistic style. Robert Mitchum's self-appointed preacher and serial killer Harry Powell terrorises West Virginia in the pursuit of his hanged former cellmate's ill-gotten gains, threatening his wily children and brutally murdering his widow in the process. In his exemplification of true evil, Robert Mitchum's performance is as icy and stark as the film's complex lighting arrangements, of which illuminate his character rather than envelope him in darkness, circumventing the conception of light representing goodness. Harry Powell is diabolical, but he is not indestructible and impervious as villains in cinema would later become; outwitted by a child and overwhelmed by an elderly woman, both of whom are invulnerable to his superficial charm, contrary to the gullible majority, and accordingly, he fails in his mercenary quest. Laughton's express intention was to bewitch audiences, and with certain shots, including the unforgettable stillness of a bound Shelley Winters in the car underneath the lake, he achieves his aim. Shot entirely in black and white in the styles and motifs of German Expressionism (strange shadows, stylised dialogue, distorted perspectives, surrealistic sets, irregular camera angles, and complex lighting techniques) the film is emblematic of a bygone era in which directors were able to design a unique look without locations or CGI.
Curiously simplistic in its depiction of two children overcoming evil aided by an unlikely saviour, the nightmarish quality of West Virginia, reimagined as a vast place of beauty menaced by hidden peril elevates it into realms of magical terror only suitable for adults. Oozing danger in every scene, the film's exploration of evil in the form of a sonorous male black widow, albeit misogynistic and entirely without care for anything other than money, is particularly unsettling in its accuracy. Dream-like and magnetic in a way that most horror films are not and visually reflective of its characters, "The Night of the Hunter" instead operates as a disturbingly beautiful mythic tale saturated by the misty folklore and enchanting yet dread-laden wildness of the Brothers Grimm universe.
