The Night of the Hunter

 THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
Director ~ Charles Laughton
Writers ~ Davis Grubb, James Agee, Charles Laughton
1955, USA
Stars ~ Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

Based upon Davis Gubb’s 1953 novel, this is Charles Laughton’s only film, adapted in 1955, apparently discouraged from more by the negative feedback it received. Taking from the case of the “Lonely Heart” murderer Harry F. Powers, hung for killing women and children for money,  Davis Grubb’s novel is in the lyrical style that traces back to Twain’s ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ mixed, the eccentric South of Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio’, with the harder contemporary crime edge of Jim Thompson. But there’s also something of a Grimm’s fairy tale. It’s a heady, entertaining and ripe read and the film knows all it has to do is follow its lead.

In adapting, Laughton wanted to hark back the Silent Era, to capture some of its wonder, to make audiences that he felt had grown complacent sit up again. If ‘The Night of the Hunter’ initially feels dated, it always did. But perhaps this homage to the old and expressionistic ways caused unintentional amusement for those not sympathetic or attuned: certainly, several reviews of the time – many were scathing – accuse it of being laughable. Maybe they were too close? Certainly, opening with children’s faces in the stars and Lancaster riding his stolen car and talking to God are broad devices, let alone filming in unfashionable black-and-white. Yet a modern audience can perhaps identify these as setting a heightened reality adjacent to fairy tale and the deliberate artifice of storytelling. There’s an affectation with purpose, the delight of moviemaking. It has of course now been reclaimed as a classic, cited as a favourite and an influence on modern directors (Scorsese, Spike Lee, Del Toro). Small town oddballs in crime Americana is the stuff of the Coen brothers and David Lynch, after all. Likely Fifties’ critics weren’t ready for the mashups and genre-blending that would flourish as cinema developed, let alone elements such as exploitation and camp.

There was a lot of the objection to portraying a preacher as Evil, but Robert Mitchum as The Preacher knows to play to the gallery, ripe as a false missionary even to himself, justifying his misogyny and homicidal intentions by crediting God. He’s having a good time. He’s hulking and slimy and whenever he’s near the kids it is tense with unease and threat. In this world, he wears the right deception and knows that smalltown traditions and prejudices will pave his way and cover him just as he likes. With this, it’s hard not to take Mrs Spoon (Evelyn Varden) as equally villainous, representing bullying blind Faith. She will turn into a personified battle-axe at the end. There are no adults in town that will save the kids, too drunk, hypocritical or self-absorbed to help. The town will turn into an outraged lynch mob too, given a target, especially one that exposes how duped and hypocritical they are. Their own mother – a brittle Shelly Winters – gives herself over to religious fervour, re-imaging herself with masochistic martyrdom, lost after the state execution of her bank robber husband. It is the money that the Preacher has come for, and he knows the kids know where to find it.

It is consistently a fascinating and odd film. And then Preacher murders their mother in an excellent chapel-like bedroom and the film hits new heights, mother’s underwater corpse a truly nightmarish and ethereal vision, properly hitting horror strings with Mitchum lumbering up the cellar stairs like a Universal monster after the kids, letting out an animal howl when they get away and then the film moves from H.A.T.E to L.O.V.E. with its dreamy river journey. Against the desperation of The Depression, the kids float past the wildlife to an almost Disneyesque makeshift orphanage, owned by Miss Cooper. But even Miss Copper rounds them up with switches and smacks, the kind of violence called discipline rather than abuse, talking to them with a mixture of sternness and sentimentality. Like Mitchum, Lilian Gish as Mrs Cooper knows how to play to the gallery. Coming from silent cinema and a hiatus of disillusionment with Hollywood, Gish is every bit the match for Mitchum’s verbose scenery chewing.

All this is true to Grubb's book, the odd tone that is almost like Ray Bradbury in its floral flourishes of small-town whimsy conflicted with Dime Crime Novel cruelty and sensationalism. The film not only takes chunks of the novel’s dialogue but also its shadow-play: the silhouette cast from the streetlamp is straight from the novel, and the passage in the cellar is a chiaroscuro in prose. It never stops to surprise with its audacious mood changes, ending as a Christmas story and the message that the children will abide. The book has no qualms about suddenly changing into first person, for example. There is contention about who contributed to the script more, James Agee or Laughton’s rewrites, and with the evidence found on Agee’s first script it comes down on his side, but it sincerely captures the book, down to many details and the mood. It’s a good tracing.

At the end of David Lynch likewise exposé of American small-town underbelly, ‘Blue Velvet’ presents a synthetic songbird: similarly, ‘The Night of the Hunter’ is also earnestly artificial. Part of the power of ‘The Night of the Hunter’ is in trying to figure out what to make of it. It is preachy, blasphemous, exaggerated, lyrical, old-fashioned and timeless. The almost oxymoronic aesthetic and mood are masterclasses in filmmaking and capturing the nature of a playful, tricksy novel. Almost twee in its depiction of humanity’s ugliness, its Southern Gothic Serial Killer Fairy-Tale moonshine apparently too ahead of its time and baffling for the studio and audiences. But ‘The Night of the Hunter’s classic place now is assured. It is haunting, vivid, always surprising and still timeless and fresh.

Backrooms

BACKROOMS
Director ~ Kane Parsons
Writers ~ Will Soodik, Kane Parsons
2026 ~ USA-Canada
Stars ~ Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass

I would say my fear of being trapped in another threatening dimension or time was unlocked first by ‘The Amazing Mister Blunden’ when I was a kid. And then there was Sapphire being trapped in a painting in ‘Sapphire and Steel’, or even the blue door in ‘From, beyond the Grave’ was scary. Strangely, I don’t remember ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ bothering me. The idea that you won’t get back was frightening.  Recently, there are entries like ‘Vivarium’, ‘Exit 8’ or ‘The Rose to Nevada’ and now ‘Backrooms’, all which tap into adult neurosis in alternate time-traps and dimensions. This is the kind of thing that Sapphire and Steel were dispatched to sort out.

Kane Parsons' original YouTube series ‘Backrooms’ is told through found footage, corporate videos, stills, muzak and drone, alternating between seemingly prosaic vignettes that contain clues and p.o.v. search-and-scares. It also suffers from that found footage annoyance of lack of framing or/and going to black or simply being undecipherable at key moments. By the end of the fourth episode, it is made clear that found footage isn’t the only medium the series will use. It taps into a truly nightmarish vision of endless bruise-yellow corridors that never end, that contains sudden half-seen threats that stomp and yowl after you. The sound-design is also key: crackling protective suit dialogue, drone, silence, static. Frequent bad camerawork and sound are features of the medium, often used to leapfrog budgetary restraints as much as putting you in the thick of fear, but here it is also the texture. However, there is no doubt that there is a full story coherent in the background, and the exposition, when it comes, is relayed by excellent voice actor work that makes even an extended episode about the light fixtures being normal fascinating and uncanny. Short bursts of clues and mystery that you can jigsaw together, ‘Backrooms’ is made by and for the YouTube generation, spawned from 4Chan, Creepypasta and social media threads and fan speculations. Creative types no longer need wait for the frustrating and negligible whims of studios.

Parsons comes across as an extremely articulate and non-posturing twenty-year-old who is totally attuned to and articulate on contemporary mediums and tools like YouTube and Blender. His fascination with liminal spaces is at the core of the ‘Backrooms’ concept, and essentially being trapped in them, or the half-remembered remnants of them, with added occasional malevolent entities. So, you get the science-fiction mystery and the “monster-in-a-maze” element, always half-seen. Yet in the original series there was also a victim that just wastes away to death because he can’t get out, which is surely just as frightening. What is obvious is that Parsons is totally in control of this story and that everyone else has caught up and now we have this film: a film totally in tune with the ambience of contemporary horror with A24 arthouse sensibilities, but also just with the anxieties of open world games (he namechecks ‘Half-Life’ and sandbox creation games like ‘Minecraft’).

But the film also stands on its own, even if the wider context of the series heightens it. It feels relevant because Parsons is tapping into the very zeitgeist of the modern gaming age and because he most evidently isn’t just winging it. Like the series, the film starts like a like an instalment of the series of the ‘V/H/S’ franchise, even down to the P.O.V. going crazy and not seeing what exactly is going on when things hit pitch. However, that is not all of Parsons’ tricks, for the depth and assuredness he presents and develops character here is not something the format of the original series promised. The successful short bursts that the YouTube series offers paves way for the excellent performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark. Clark is already in a liminal state – estranged from him wife, living in the furniture store that he owns – when we meet him: what is satisfying is that everything has a logical progression in that his already established temper leads him to an outburst that leads him to discovering the backrooms. Ejiofor gives a very real and brilliant portrayal of a character type that is all too recognisable: stuck in resentment for himself and others, seemingly always at battle with both, and therefore suspectable to the paradox of the Backrooms.

When things turn a little ‘Maniac’, it feels a let-down of the nuanced work Ejiofor has done: such obvious horror tropes seem unnecessary. In introducing the backrooms idea, Parson says:

“So it’s kind of like a very benign version of … purgatory or hell myth, but without any kind of damnation aspect. It’s inherently a force of nature that you can’t negotiate with, and it doesn’t pull you in because you’ve done something wrong. It does it because reality broke.”

The enigma around the backrooms ultimately remains, and indeed does not need explanation, but that it is partially a huge unregulated therapy session for Clark tells again of filmmakers being too self-aware and not letting the subconscious do the work (one can imagine the deliberate lacunae David Lynch would have left). There is platitudinous therapy speak wrapped around the whole affair, almost sinisterly. Yet that the Backrooms feed from the trauma of those that enter its endless hallways has been evident in its building mythos, but not quite so overtly stated. The looming entity derived from Clark, staggering around in disturbing in its uncanny cartoonishness is enough.

Or as Brian Tallerico writes, “While “Backrooms” finds some twisted imagery along the way, it does have a bad habit of trying to explain itself more than it should.” The performances are high calibre, the conceit is unforgettable, the plotting solidly considered, the mystery tantalising, the true scope available with further watching of the series. There is an “almost-great” feel to the end product, but the promise of ‘Backrooms’ and Kane Parsons are considerable, should you go down the rabbit hole. Certainly, if it works for you, you’ll be wanting more.

Passenger

PASSENGER
Director ~ André Øvredal
Writers ~ Zachary Donohue, T.W. Burgess
2026, US
Stars ~ Jacob Scipio, Lou Llobell, Melissa Leo

André Øvredal has submitted fun and agreeable horrors before (‘Troll Hunter’, ‘The Autopsy of Jane Joe’, ‘Scary Stories to tell in the Dark’ and ‘The last Voyage of the Demeter’, although I understand I saw an edit of the latter that was much better than what you’ll currently find)  but ‘Passenger’ is mostly dull and rote with an underwhelming characters, a meagre malevolent entity and laughable St. Christopher hocus pocus. It contains one vivid “outdoor cinema in the woods” sequence where Øvredal gets to show what he can really do and almost making this worth the pitstop, but it is tired folk horror stuff with a cruel rule of “Just don’t stop to help” and resolved by simply conforming.

Exit 8

 EXIT 8
8-BAN DEGUCHI
Director  ~ Genki Kawamura
Writers ~ Kotake Create, Kentaro Hirase, Genki Kawamura
2025, Japan
Stars ~ Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi, Naru Asanuma

Our hapless protagonist The Lost Man is caught in a time loop inspired by a 2023 video game by Kotake Create. He must figure out the surrounding anomalies in order to find the way out: sometimes they are not so obvious, sometimes a flood. 

It is a limited scenario which involves most of the action repeatedly going around corners of a subway tunnel. The anxiety of being trapped in a time loop or paradox (see ‘The Rose of Nevada’ for another contemporary variation) creates the tension. Defined by perpetual uneasiness, puncutated by moments of creepiness, and inevitably tied in with the Lost Man’s emotional concerns, just to keep things tidy as his reality glitches. But also the potential horror of a repetative everyday worklife, a life undercooked and pressured into an overcrowded train daily. You have to spare some sympathy for the mild type, regularly targeted by the supernatural and other forces that put them through the wringer in a bid to make them learn to be more confrontational. And how many genre reality breaks happen because of pending parenthood?

It is Yamato Kôchi as The Walking Man that will leave the most impression as much as the tiles of the subway walls: he is panicky where The Lost Man is muted and offers the uncanny smile since the ‘Smile’ franchise. Although it may suffer from its intentional repetitiveness, Kawamura expands from the simplicty and limitations of the source to convincing feature-length. It could be seen as unfairly finger-wagging at introverts and mild people and simply to look up from your phone, although there is no sense of meanness here, just the horror of being trapped both externally and internally. If anything, the film is a note to pay attention to your surroundings, to note the nuances and differences. It is a example of how to successfully adapt a non-fighty game and a decent, off-the-wall entry into indie reality-breaks genre, even if it feels like watching someone else playing at times.