1955 film by Charles Laughton
The Night of the Hunter is a 1955 American Southern Gothic horror-thriller film directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. The screenplay by James Agee was based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb. The plot is about Preacher Harry Powell (Mitchum), a serial killer who poses as a preacher and pursues two children in an attempt to get his hands on $10,000 of stolen cash hidden by their late father.
The novel and film draw on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murder of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The film's lyrical and expressionistic style, borrowing techniques from silent film, sets it apart from other Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has influenced such later directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Altman, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, the Coen brothers, and Guillermo del Toro.
The Night of the Hunter premiered on July 26, 1955, in Des Moines, Iowa, to negative reviews. It became the only directorial feature of Laughton. Over the years, the film has been positively reevaluated and is considered one of the greatest films ever made and a defining film of the Southern Gothic genre. In 1992, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant." French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma selected The Night of the Hunter in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, behind Citizen Kane.
Plot summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.