100 Scariest Movie Moments: #90 The Night of the Hunter

It baffles me that The Night of the Hunter made it past the censors in the days of the Hayes Code. For anyone unfamiliar with it, the Hayes Code was a strict production standard that all major American studios went by from the 1930s until 1968 when the ratings system was developed. Among other things, it explicitly banned negative depictions of religious authorities.

My best guess is that they side-stepped this rule by opening the movie with a bible verse warning of “false prophets.” Presumably they explained to the censors that you can't blaspheme if you're film is inspired by the religion supposedly being blasphemed against.

Robert Mitchum plays a criminal preacher... or a criminal pretending to be a preacher... or a preacher who honestly believes that God is OK with the truly despicable things he does... it isn't really clear. He was cellmates with a bank robber (Peter Graves) who was executed and wants to find the man's money. So he marries his widow (Shelley Winters) and attempts to coerce the information from his children (Billy Chaplain and Sally Jane Bruce).

The initial hour of the film consists of this general formula as he tries to intimidate the son and sweet-talk the daughter into telling him where the money is hidden. He eventually murders his new wife, and isolates the children.

To me, the single most frightening moment is immediately after the daughter gives in. For just a second, his high-brow speech drops and gives way to a much more low-class accent (“The dahl! Why sure! The last place anyone would think to look!”). In this moment you get a clear view of the wolf in sheep’s clothing that our villain truly is. And the fact that he's able to maintain his facade so perfectly in every other scene of the movie is absolutely chilling.

The remaining half-hour of the movie is actually fairly dull, and exists mostly to make sure the villain is punished. The children escape and take refuge with a shotgun-wielding old lady (Lillian Gish) who keeps their step-father at bay. He attempts to get in, but eventually resolves himself to sitting outside, intimidating them. Any hope for an ultimate climax is destroyed when the police arrive and arrest him without incident. It’s made very clear that the town has turned against him (they barely avoid a lynching), and that he is certain to be executed for his crimes.

The movie then wraps up with a dull speech about how the children will be OK, because the Hayes code was not willing to bend on the issue of the children being OK. And the ending is a big disappointment for an otherwise almost flawless film. You could say that I'm expecting formula, but there's a reason cliches became cliches. This is the rare case in which a studio executive should have stormed onto the set and demanded an ending with gunfire and explosions. If nothing else, it would have been preferable to this Hayes Code-induce anti-climax.