A Perfect Villain

This week, Southern Gothic, deadites, and Isabelle Adjani. Spoilers for The Night of the Hunter.

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ The Night of the Hunter, dir. Charles Laughton, 1955.

Fairy Tale. Laughton brings high style to a simple story about children in danger. The Night of the Hunter's black-and-white, German-Expressionism-by-way-of-Southern-Gothic visual style looks like no other movie. It might evoke its real world setting at a script level, but its visuals fashion a different world from the West Virginia building blocks. The Night of the Hunter is distinctly artificial. Shot almost entirely on sound stages (with a bit of West Virginia here and there, sometimes in composite shots), the visuals are stark, abstract, favoring silhouettes and strong, simple shapes. Its depiction of starscapes and animal life are stylized, never naturalistic. The Night of the Hunter’s otherworldliness, its artificiality decisively unmoors the story from its time and place. Its fairy tale quality, its allegorical weight, aren’t bleeding in from the margins, aren’t subtextual. They’re in the visual substance right before our eyes.  

Preacher. The Night of the Hunter feels like a fairy tale, but its characters inhabit a specific American setting. They’re small town West Virginians. It’s a down-home, folksy world (sometimes folksily sentimental) where a preacher is just the right antagonist. Preacher Powell’s power as a figure doesn’t stem simply from contrast—from being a bad man in a good man’s clothes. It wouldn’t be the same if he were a priest or a doctor. In the 1950s, in a small town at the edge of the American South, a preacher isn’t just culturally exalted—he’s a producer of the culture, an organizer of cultural space. A religious leader in the dominant religious idiom, Preacher Powell moves through a world he has a unique ability to bend and shape. He’s a perfect villain.