The Night of the Hunter has stood the test of time ever since its release in 1955. While it was considered a box office failure at the time — sadly becoming the only project that famed actor Charles Laughton ever directed — it has become greatly appreciated over the decades.
In the 2022 Sight & Sound poll ranking the greatest films of all time, Laughton’s now-revered classic placed at #25. Every so often, film Twitter seems to go on the rounds about it being one of the best films of all time. It’s not particularly difficult to see why its reception has grown so significantly nearly 70 years after its release, along with why audiences at the time may have been turned off by it.
For one, it’s a hazy, eerily effective portrayal of what happens to childhood innocence upon the arrival of religious greed. When Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) rolls into Moundsville, a religious and socially conservative town, he poses as a fake preacher to bleed into the lives of Willa (Shelley Winters) and her two kids, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). Harry’s unhinged thirst for his former cellmate Ben’s (Peter Graves) hidden $10,000 reveals John and Pearl’s untrusting nature towards adults. It’s a lesson the siblings have to learn quickly following their father, Ben’s, imprisonment, even quicker than Harry can manipulate Willa into falling in love with him.
The film’s nuanced and complex exploration of religion — and what happens when a religious community blindly follows self-proclaimed prophets who speak their verses — creates an unsettling, uneasy atmosphere. Something tells me that Harry Powell and Paul Atreides would’ve been really good friends.
Laughton’s structurally bold film was so clearly not of its time that when revisiting it today, it feels incredibly fresh and modern. Not only does the film dissect Harry as a manipulative force, but it speaks to how often society ignores children and their perspectives. So when it was recently announced that The Night of the Hunter of all movies was getting a remake, I couldn’t help but scratch my head.
There’s no shortage of remakes and adaptations of classic films, with Rebecca and West Side Story being just two recent examples. But when I think of the most successful adaptations, like Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (2019), there are always changes or updates that justify revisiting classic tales. In the case of West Side Story, Spielberg brought back the magic in 2021 due to a new visual look as well as more representative casting choices (the original cast from the 1961 film largely wore brownface).
When I think of The Night of the Hunter, I struggle to see what could be gleaned from remaking a story that has already been re-examined and better appreciated by modern audiences. In a post on X, writer C. Robert Cargill wrote that the original film “was based on a novel that was *MUCH DARKER* than the 1950s would allow.” True: The Night of the Hunter was released during the Hays Code, a set of regulations that censored major studio films from featuring content deemed immoral.
However, by that time, the code had become more difficult to enforce. After all, The Night of the Hunter was following the footsteps of some pretty dark film noirs like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Strangers on a Train (1951). The Night of the Hunter took a much more critical lens on religious ideology and rhetoric than most films at the time — what I suspect to be the main reason it struggled to find an audience in 1955.
Not every detail from Davis Grubb’s book is present in the 1955 film, but that speaks to what it means to adapt a book to a film in the first place. Make no mistake: The Night of the Hunter is one of the most frightening films I’ve ever seen. The desolate marsh swamps, the distant sounds of Harry singing “Leaning” and Mitchum’s shattering serial killer performance have all stuck with me after multiple viewings.
What isn’t directly shown in the film — the implications of silence, of children singing solemn lullabies, of empty fields, of an unknown, looming presence — were Laughton’s biggest assets as a director. Just because not every detail of Harry’s murders is fully seen on screen doesn’t mean we don’t fully grasp or feel the root of his evil and lack of humanity. The cinematic landscape and use of shadows bring the story to life in a vivid, lucid way that speaks directly to the themes of corruption.
While many common discussions surrounding book-to-film adaptations focus on what is omitted as a point of contention, this approach often fails to recognize how drastically different the two mediums are. What Laughton chooses to cut away from is just as powerful as what he decides to show us. Every choice is intentional and should be examined as such.
Now, that’s not to say that I don’t see any potential with this upcoming remake. Scott Derrickson, who is set to direct this adaptation, has a proven track record with credits on Sinister and The Black Phone. My biggest fear is that the desire to make a darker adaptation that shows more violence simply for the sake of “showing more” will thwart the masterful visual storytelling seen in Laughton’s original. As the old saying goes: sometimes less really is more.
No matter how this new version turns out, my hope is that it will encourage even more people to check out what Laughton was able to achieve back in the 50s. It’s a real tragedy that Laughton was so discouraged from the film’s reception that he never made another feature: all the more reason to preserve the legacy of 1955’s The Night of the Hunter.
Analysis Courtesy of Matt Minton
Feature Image Credit to United Artists via American Cinematographer