The Night of the Hunter

It’s the most haunted and dreamlike of all American films, a gothic backwoods ramble with the Devil at its heels. Read full review

This is the only film Laughton ever directed, and he packed it with a mixture of eerie chills, ingenious suspense, and absurdist humor. It's a genuine classic. Read full review

Laughton understood Agee's proximity to Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie of its day. Read full review

Part fairy tale and part bogeyman thriller -- a juicy allegory of evil, greed and innocence, told with an eerie visual poetry. Read full review

One of the greatest of all American films, but has never received the attention it deserves because of its lack of the proper trappings. Many "great movies'' are by great directors, but Laughton directed only this one film, which was a critical and commercial failure long overshadowed by his acting career. Read full review

An enduring masterpiece--dark, deep, beautiful, aglow. Read full review

A haunting, Aesop-like parable of good and evil, The Night of the Hunter is well worthy of classic status thanks to its wonderfully realised cast of Southern players, Walter Schumann’s dexterous original score and Cortez’s enrapturing, expressionistic visuals. Read full review

Every frame of this film is brilliantly contrived, particularly the underwater nightmare at the end. A gripping, complex chiller. Read full review

The Night of the Hunter is nearly as demented as its lead villain, and I mean that as a compliment. Read full review

Unforgettably haunting images (a car submerged in a watery grave; a spider's web view of the children fleeing in a riverboat to the strains of Pretty Fly; a silhouetted angel of death) make this a perennially unsettling masterpiece from which modern chillers could learn much. Read full review

Perverse yet remarkably life-affirming, Night of the Hunter may be the best film ever made about spiritual perseverance. Read full review

Hunter is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the stuff of dreams, too, and it beckons you to follow it downstream. Read full review

Beautiful, haunting, poetic, and intensely personal, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER is a unique, terrifying masterpiece. Read full review

One of the great movie horror tales, with one of the greatest of all movie villains, appeared to relatively little fanfare in 1955 when actor Charles Laughton released his sole movie directorial effort: a startlingly Gothic visualization of Davis Grubb's Southern nightmare novel The Night of the Hunter.[23 Nov 2001, p.C5]

From its guileless exposition and comically life-drawn Americana, to its Scripture quotations and sensitivity to a child’s perspective, the film proceeds with a simplicity of inexhaustible depth. Read full review

A powerfully cinematic modern allegory of love and fear. [20 Oct 1987, p.3]

Ignored for a long time, this film is now impossible to ignore. Mitchum is magnetic. Read full review

Despite its peculiar overtones of humor, this is one of the most frightening movies ever made.

Although The Night of the Hunter offers many pleasures for students of film history, its ability to captivate a generation for which its qualities are so foreign is as much an indication of how degraded film literacy has become as a counterargument to the movie’s timelessness. Read full review

There is a strong trace of Freudian aberration, fanaticism and iniquity. Credit Mr. Laughton with a clever and exceptionally effective job of catching the ugliness and terror of certain ignorant, small-town types. Read full review

This start for Gregory as producer and Laughton as director is rich in promise but the completed product, bewitching at times, loses sustained drive via too many offbeat touches that have a misty effect. Read full review