The Night of the Hunter (1955)

In this film, Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a preacher and a serial killer.  In prison, he meets Ben Harper, a condemned man with $10,000 hidden away somewhere.  Powell coaxes information out of Ben about his family.  After Ben is hanged, Powell travels to his hometown and begins ingratiating himself to the locals.  They're all pleased to have a new preacher in town, and they encourage Ben's widow, Willa, to marry Powell.  The young Harper children, John and Pearl, are the only ones who know where Ben hid the money.  What ensues is John's desperate effort to defend his family from Powell's onslaught against their safety.

Mitchum makes sense in the sinister role of Powell.  He rarely played a nice person in a film, even when he wasn't the bad guy.  But the film also expects you to believe that people trust him and admire him as a moral role model.  It works because of his booming voice.  He doesn't earn people's trust through warmth or benevolence, but simply by projecting authority.  And he buys his own performance.  In his private moments, he still sees himself as a man of God.  Again, he's a preacher and a serial killer, not a serial killer posing as a preacher. 

This character's presence scandalized many people when the film came out.  So did the film's portrayal of his marriage to an innocent woman.  Those people saw it as an affront to Christianity and marriage as institutions.  But even if that's what The Night of the Hunter is, it's not because of Harry Powell.  It's because of the complacency of everyone surrounding him and the Harper family, and their receptiveness to him. 

It never says exactly where it takes place, but the story was inspired by real events that occurred in Virginia.  At night, interior spaces dissolve into shadow along the edges.  The parts we can see look off-kilter, with light appearing in triangular patches.  Outside, Powell will encroach on his victims as a pitch dark silhouette.  The characters are imprisoned in thorny environments floating in a void.

In one of their attempts to escape from Powell, John and Pearl cast themselves into the wilderness.  The night sky is starry, and the landscape is only hazily visible.  Moonlight reflects off the surface of a river.  The film foregrounds the surrounding flora and fauna as John and Pearl simply wait to find out what will happen to them.  This imagery is beautiful, not oppressive like the abyssal shadows that accompany Powell's appearances.  This is the most lyrical part of the film.  It is not, however, reassuring.  This sequence is when it becomes most apparent that this film takes place during the Great Depression.  We see children beg for food and men beg for work.  

The film evokes such a distinct place in space and time, and the evils it depicts are embedded in a vexingly plain, plausible environment of patriarchal authority and social ignorance.  At the same time, it feels like the film's conflict is playing out on a cosmic scale, like Powell is the incarnation of an elemental evil.  There's no tension between these different impressions, because through the eyes of children, they look the same.  One thing the film asks you to remember is that "it's a hard world for little things."  For them, horror can come in the size of a man, a town, or the whole universe.  It's all mysterious.  At the same time, the lack of fixity in their perspectives makes them stronger than adults, able to vary on the things adults become complacent in.