YMMV / The Night of the Hunter

• Accidental Aesop: Don't let someone push you into something you are unsure about. When she first meets Harry, Willa has some doubts about him, not the least being that John seems to know something is off about him. However, Icey keeps hounding her and basically trying to force Willa to date Harry. Things might have played out a lot different if Willa had not let herself be forced into marrying Harry.
• Adaptation Displacement: Hardly anybody remembers that this was originally a novel by Davis Grubb (a best-selling and critically acclaimed novel, in fact).
• Award Snub: Unavoidable, since the movie was panned on release. In hindsight it's considered one of the premiere Noir thrillers, and that Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish deserved Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress consideration.
• Catharsis Factor: While the ending does drag on for a bit, it's still really satisfying to watch Harry get his comeuppance after everything he's done.
• Complete Monster: Harry Powell, a Serial Killer and self-appointed preacher, is introduced reminiscing about his previous murders as he was fleeing the sight of his latest murder. After sharing a cell with a bank robber, he gets out of prison and marries Willa, the bank robber's wife, believing her children knew where the stolen money was hidden. He skillfully endears himself to the town, and practically brainwashes Willa into believing his every word. When she overheard him asking the children about the money, he slits her throat as she was laying in bed, dumps her body into the river, and makes up a story to cover for it. In order to get the children to tell him where the money was, he threatens to murder the son, John, while his sister watched. While pursuing them, he kills a farmer, steals a horse and chases them across the state. Believing that God wanted him to murder women, Powell was a chilling psychopath who is unfettered when it comes to what he wants.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rachel Cooper only appears in the final third of the film, and yet the audience absolutely loves her due to her sympathetic backstory, the fact that she's a protective, considerate and reasonable adoptive mother to a group of orphaned children, being the only person other then John to see Harry Powell for who he truly is, and not being afraid to stand her ground against him, and overall being just as well-hearted and caring as Powell is malevolent.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending can also feel a bit like this. Sure, Harry is going to be hung, but John and Pearl still lost both of their parents, and there's quite a bit of indication that John, if not both the kids, have either quietly gone insane or at the very least now have a form of PTSD. The ending where John gives Rachel an apple for Christmas makes him seem more dead inside then the heartwarming moment it's meant to come off as. This does follow the fairy tale theme true, as the endings of those stories didn't always end happily ever after.
• Evil Is Cool: Harry Powell is easily the most well-known and iconic character in the film. Yes, he's a absolute scumbag with no sympathetic aspects, but the fans still admire Robert Mitchum's terrifying yet charismatic performance along with his symbolic values and the famous Knuckle Tattoos.
• Fandom Rivalry: While there's plenty of intersection between fans who love Mitchum's performances in both Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear, there's an ongoing debate over which character is the overall better villain - Reverend Harry Powell or Max Cady. It's generally agreed on that Max Cady is the more physically imposing and immediately dangerous of the two, while Harry Powell is generally more dangerous because of his ideology and worldview coupled with his charismatic charm - with the rebuttals being that Max Cady is physically powerful but has too simplistic a motivation, and that Powell is more complex but is grandiose, hammy and gets easily taken down by a little old lady. The fact that the American Film Institute put Max Cady one ranking ahead of Harry Powell on its 50 Greatest Movie Villains list in 2003 hasn't done much to settle this argument.
• Heartwarming Moments: "They abide and they endure."
• Love to Hate: Harry Powell is an absolutely loathsome man with absolutely no redeeming qualities, but Robert Mitchum's terrifying yet charismatic performance has left him as one of the most iconic villains in the history of cinema.
• Moment of Awesome: Rachel singing "Leaning on Jesus, leaning on Jesus" in counterpoint to Powell's "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarm." It's a beautiful moment◊ showing the tension between the two, and a CMoA for Rachel showing how tough she is, and that her motives are pure.
  • It's awesome in a visual way as well. Powell is lit brightly from one side, with the other side of his face in dark shadow, emphasizing his "two-faced" nature. Rachel, on the other hand, though not directly lit, is easily visible in silhouette, with the spillover light strongly resembling a halo.
• Memetic Mutation: LOVE and HATE tattooed on the knuckles, 'nuff said. The speech he gives explaining those tattoos also pops up every now and then (e.g.: Do the Right Thing).
• Moral Event Horizon: If Powell didn't cross it when he murdered Willa in cold blood, dumped her body in a river and made up a story to cover for it, he most certainly did when he threatens to murder John in front of Pearl. You could argue that while he was a nasty and horrible person to begin with, threatening to murder a child just for stolen money shows just how much of a monster Powell is.
• Once Original, Now Common: At the time of the movie's release, portraying a priest as a villain was considered a shocking and controversial subversion of Hollywood's usual tropes. Nowadays, it would be more surprising to see one portrayed positively.
• One-Scene Wonder: Peter Graves as Ben Harper, though he's technically a two-scene wonder.
• Padding: For some viewers, the last twenty minutes or so drag and drag hard with their emphasis on Powell getting his comeuppance. While this satisfied The Hays Code, which stated all villains needed to be punished and that murderers could not get away with the deed, you can't really blame this on the filmmakers since that's how the novel ends and the film very faithfully adapts the novel. Likewise, the same sequence shows the hypocrisy of the townsfolk who want to lynch Powell and claim to be doing this on behalf of the same kids whose abuse they enabled by buying into Powell's scam, and the larger social point that Laughton wanted to emphasize was that Powell is merely an extreme manifestation of some of society's ugliest tendencies.
• Signature Scene:
  • Rev. Powell telling the story of Right-Hand-Left-Hand and his Knuckle Tattoos.
  • The shot of Willa Harper's corpse at the bottom of the lake, with her body tied and weighted down to the car, and her hair floating eerily among the underwater vegetation.
  • The entire river-escape montage scene, with Pearl singing a night-story and then John on seeing Powell's silhouette pursuing them from afar, mutters in horror, "Don't he never sleep?"
  • The singing duet between Rev. Powell and Rachel Cooper during the Night when Powell stands outside the house, with Powell singing "leaning" and Rachel joining in "Lean on Jesus".
• Special Effect Failure: The spiderweb obviously made of string in the foreground, as John and Pearl sail down the river. The scene didn't need it, and it distracts from an otherwise beautiful nighttime montage.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Ben Harper. It may be difficult to feel very bad for him when he kills two men while robbing a bank and puts all the stress of hiding the stolen money on his eight-to-ten-year-old son, rather than telling his wife Willa (an adult who might have been able to handle it much better). Whilst he couldn't have known what Powell would do, it still isn't very fair to put that sort of burden on a child.
• Values Dissonance: Yes, Rachel is a Cool Old Lady, but the scene where she uses Corporal Punishment on one of the children may not endear her to some contemporary viewers.
• Values Resonance:
  • On the other hand, part of the reason for the film's revaluation over time was in critics finding the horrors represented by Harry Powell (a misogynistic religious fanatic fooling people with his aura of good pastor) increasingly relevant in modern society. This also goes for the film's portrayal of Ms. Cooper as a strong, independent older woman who saves the day without the aid of any man.
  • While not the first film to tackle mob vigilante justice or lynchings - most notably The Ox-Bow Incident, Of Mice and Men, and Johnny Guitar had all tackled these themes prior - the angry mob that forms with the intent of lynching Harry Powell is depicted in as negative and ominous a light as the Preacher himself. Where most films of the period that were critical of lynching framed it as being wrong because the target was an innocent victim being unjustly persecuted, Charles Laughton goes to lengths to show that mob justice is not justified even if it is directed towards the guilty or the evil. Icey Spoon's snarled face as she screams "Lynch him! Lynch him!" is especially disconcerting to watch through a modern-day lens, with the knowledge that lynchings throughout history have been perpetrated just as often by ordinary members of a community and not just by roughneck cattle ranchers in black hats.
• Vindicated by History: The film did so poorly that Charles Laughton never got a chance to direct another, but is today widely acknowledged as a masterpiece.
• The Woobie: Willa Harper. She loses her husband, and is pressured into marrying an evil serial killer by her friends. He then proceeds to force her into believing she is a sinful woman who deserves to be abused, before murdering and drowning her.

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