"The Night of the Hunter" (1955)

An english actor of considerable size & talent, Charles Laughton, directs an anomalous film, his only film, fastening on the theme of southern gothic horror as an englishman would imagine it, saturated with a primeval romance of evil that a genuine and rightfully grim fairy tale would have (and which will be attributed to the literary fineness of James Agee's screenplay). Robert Mitchum plays the wolfman, interprets him as a preacher (an interpretation which Stephen King would take up in Silver Bullet, where the preacher is a priest, and the priest really is a werewolf stalking a boy who knows his secret). When Mitchum is shot at, or when the door slams on his fingers, or when the apple of his demented eye rows away in a boat into the depth of the night, he howls as no human would. An unearthly ravenous howl, of inhuman hunger and strange appetites. Women are anathema to him: when the lust rises in his flesh, his knife goes erect. L-O-V-E on his masculine right hand, H-A-T-E on his effeminate left. Yet hate consumes him more, hence his queerness. At night he hunts for children, slits their throats, throws corpses into the river. "Her hair streaming like meadowgrass in a floodstream, the slit in her neck large enough to be an extra mouth." The South is lawless, brigands roam freely on stolen horses like barnowls in the dark, at liberty to pick off stray litter and slake their biblical bloodlust. A place of wretched dreams, in which lawabiding christians either murder baptists or lynch murderers of baptists. Where children are routinely victimized and psychologically tormented, but "they abide, they endure." So Lillian Gish tells us, shotgun snug in the crook of her right arm, maternal. The southern gentleman can be both christian and vengeful, yet old women & young damsels alike swoon to his profane prayers, don't mind his night vices so much as dream of his strong tattooed hands gripping their gooseflesh arms. He croons, "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms / Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms." When the women touch him, he switches his knife, his back straightens, his eyes go black. The shadows crop up behind him, and the second you lose watch, he's gone, gone into the thick blooddark pie of the night. Children with dirty faces go hungry, orphans lost in the moonlit wilderness, and 10,000 dollars stuffed in a doll, of which they understand nothing but the insanity that brings iniquitous men to seek it, fly out into the wild suffocating air, into the oppressive heat, and on the dead faces of the swaying hanging fathers of fatherless children.