The Birth of a Noir Consciousness in The Night of the Hunter

At first glance, the gothic and the noir genre may seem quite mutually distinguishable: the former, with its castles, ghosts, and curses, involves a fear of the past; the latter, set in modern urban landscapes, a fear of the future. Yet, a deep sense of fatalism and impending doom permeates both. They also often feature anguished and troubled protagonists who try to navigate through oneiric, manic worlds. Stylistically, both employ expressionistic elements, at times even to the point of excess. It has always seemed to me like the two genres are less distinct narratives and more complementary representations of existential unease.

A good example of this blurred generic boundary is Charles Laughton’s 1955 Southern Gothic film The Night of the Hunter. While it is primarily a horror thriller set in the dark, fundamentalist atmosphere of rural Americana, the film seems to act as a thematic precursor to the noir state of mind. This is because the film shows the perspective of a morally pure child who tries to resist the nightmarish corruption of the adult world around him, which at times is too much to bear. In the film, young siblings John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) flee from Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a serial killer posing as a preacher who attempts to uncover their dead father’s hidden fortune. The focalizer, twelve-year-old-ish John, seems like the only sensible character for the bulk of the film, with the remaining adults often appearing as one-sided caricatures. For John, the townspeople are too dementedly prone to the fake preacher’s influence: his mother is too weak to be a moral beacon, his uncle is too cowardly to resist Powell, and his younger sister is too naive to recognize evil. Very much in noir fashion, the main character is alienated in a neurotic and morally corrupt world. Similar to films such as The Man on the Third Floor, the world around the child seems to increasingly descend into a dreamlike excess. This excess continues until we reach a resolution that technically solves the problem but still feels unsatisfactory, almost too good to be true (an old lady, Rachel, adopts the children and the whole family celebrates Christmas). Indeed, John is witty and brave, calmly making one good decision after another. However, when the evil preacher is arrested, he is reminded of the trauma of his father’s arrest and breaks down on the spot—it is clear that trauma will never leave him. As Davis Grubb writes in his essay “The Introduction to Evil,” the film speaks to a “terrible loneliness” that “must come to a sensitive childhood despoiled by the evil of adults.” The film thus reflects a thematic groundwork for the world of these “adults” that noir films explore.

Stylistically, The Night of the Hunter uses images and sounds very similar to those found in noir. Powell’s figure is almost always seen through looming, enlarging shadows before his entry into the shot. There is much contrast in lighting, often reaching the point of chiaroscuro lighting—strong juxtapositions of light and shadow—especially in indoor scenes. Laughton also frequently employs unbalanced composition and skewed camera angles. At times, the film feels stylistically too dramatic, even excessive: for example, after Powell kills the children’s mother, there is a shot of her body submerged underwater, with her long blond hair floating and mingling with the river weeds, giving the image an almost ethereal quality. Similarly, as John and Pearl ride the boat down the river, Laughton interweaves shots of turtles, owls, rabbits, toads, and sheep. These are images that are purely atmospheric and do not seem to contribute much to the plot.

Indeed, the term “excess” feels fitting to describe the film itself. The film was marketed as a horror-thriller (Archer), but is a story-within-a-story of a child’s fable, and somehow also feels like a fairytale. It doesn’t quite feel fully gothic either. Just like noir, the film operates in a liminal space and is “self conscious” (The New York Times) yet still can’t quite make sense of itself. It has confused audiences and critics alike (Vineberg). Unsurprisingly, it was a box office bomb. The New York Times called the film “a weird and intriguing endeavor;” Newsweek called the film too “arty.” The film Critic Robert Hess in The Threepenny Review notes that it was a “miracle” that the film “even got made in the first place.” The commercial and critical failure of the film was so profound that it led first-time director Charles Laughton to abandon his directorial career entirely. Ultimately, the film is very much, in the words of Maltby, a “maladjusted text.”

Bibliography

Archer, Eugene. "The Night of the Hunter." Film Culture, vol. 1, no. 5-6, Film Culture, Winter 1955, pp. 32-33. Global Cinema, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research / Media History Digital Library, 2 Nov. 2023.

Maltby, Richard. "‘Film Noir’: The Politics of the Maladjusted Text." Journal of American Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, Apr. 1984, pp. 49-71, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27554400.

Michelfelder, William. "The Introduction to Evil." Review of The Night of the Hunter, by Davis Grubb. The American Scholar, vol. 23, no. 3, Summer 1954, pp. 360, 362. The Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Vineberg, Steve. "Enchantment and Terror." Review of The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton. The Threepenny Review, no. 47, Autumn 1991, pp. 27-29, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4384030.

Welsch, Tricia. "Foreign Exchange: German Expressionism and Its Legacy." Cinema Journal, vol. 38, no. 4, Summer 1999, pp. 98-102, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225667.

Jessie Li is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Film & Media. She is from Shanghai, China.

@jessie.qishan.li