Rachel offers "purity and protection": The Night of the Hunter

The two films under examination here, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), would have you believe that nothing harrows the soul like an attack on family. These films – cinematic endurance tests, really, obstacle courses whose finish line is morning’s first light – wield the immersive power of shadows and light, black-and-white cinematography, sound and set design, and performance to induce a powerful fear that seeks to attack the comfort and safety associated with a familial unit, be it one of common blood and deep bond, or simply a common proximity and shared desire to survive. After all, if home is where the heart is, without it we’re just meat.

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What lies at the heart of humankind’s basest, most desolate fears? Cinematic renditions of terror often take the form of loss of sanity (in such hallucinatory films as Polanski’s Repulsion and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now); monsters and demons (a killer shark in Spielberg’s Jaws and the devil himself in Friedkin’s The Exorcist); or ghostly reminders of dreadful pasts and desperate futures (the vengeful, morality-delivering spirits of Kobayashi’s Kwaidan and Kubrick’s The Shining). Horror essayist Isabel Cristina Pinedo finds that “horror is produced by the violation of what are tellingly called natural laws – by the disruption of our presuppositions about the integrity and predictable character of objects, places, animals, and people. The horror film throws into question our assumptions about reality and unreality” (91). If that’s so, what then is more primally terrifying than having the family and home disrupted, split apart and, in some cases, devoured by evil? The home is a place where we most readily, most predictably, batten down our sense of self, and we expect not to have to thwart assaults on our sense of geo-logic and the very walls we engender to demarcate them.

The two films under examination here, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), would have you believe that nothing harrows the soul like an attack on family. These films – cinematic endurance tests, really, obstacle courses whose finish line is morning’s first light – wield the immersive power of shadows and light, black-and-white cinematography, sound and set design, and performance to induce a powerful fear that seeks to attack the comfort and safety associated with a familial unit, be it one of common blood and deep bond, or simply a common proximity and shared desire to survive. After all, if home is where the heart is, without it we’re just meat.

Director Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is a unique horror film, if it is one at all – its mise-en-scène and bombastic, archetypal Robert Mitchum performance as the deranged Preacher Powell has its roots in the intergenerational Southern Gothic folktales and dark fables mined to scare the shit out of kids – generating its primal terror from despair’s ground zero: the point of view of two children who have had both of their parents stolen from them. In the opening moments, after a gentle, yet abstract, sermon delivered from the stars above by the ethereal Miss Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish as the children’s eventual savior) to her gaggle of orphan adoptees, the camera swoops down on a couple of young boys playing hide and seek across the backyards of a rural neighborhood. It’s a beautifully fluid crane shot, one of many transcendent images that oppose the brimming, ugly evil that permeates the diegesis. The boys find the corpse of a woman crumpled on a bulkhead’s steps, and the camera lifts off into the air again, this time to connect us to the crime’s culprit. The camera touches down on the unhinged preacher, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), speeding away from his murder scene in his comically incongruous jalopy, chattering to an absent God. This sequence establishes the motif of flight from family and mortal danger, the two sometimes inextricably linked together, and one that the young Harper children, John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce), will soon embark on to escape Powell’s clutches.

Laughton’s decision to shoot in black and white – in an era that saw the commercial advent of Cinemascope and Technicolor – adds to the textual, tactile experience of Hunter. Moved by the dramatic and compositional grandeur of D.W. Griffith (of 1916’s Intolerance and 1919’s Broken Blossoms, silent classics both), “the black and white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is in a different, more deliberately archaic style [than its contemporaries] … keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were” (Rafferty 11). That nod to the era in which the film is set, during the withering throes of the Great Depression (coupled with the casting of silent movie megastar Lillian Gish), is a constant reminder of its attendant social strife. The Depression looms large over the proceedings – Powell’s murderous modus operandi, in the end, is nothing more than a grab for cash – itself a destroyer of families, and the high-contrast blacks and whites of Stanley Cortez’s cinematography capture that specific moment in history which could have spelled our national doom, but instead, by 1955, supplied aesthetically nostalgic fodder for storytelling.

The Harper house, starkly positioned on an otherwise minimally cluttered lot, is often shrouded in shadows. It’s telling that Laughton cuts from a scene of an executioner guard (Paul Bryar) at home with his wife as he laments the hanging of prison escapee and Harper patriarch Ben (Peter Graves) to inside little John and Pearl’s bedroom, where the protective older brother relates a bedtime fable to his little sister. In time, Laughton suggests, these will all just be stories, fragments of fables passed from one generation of family to the next, the moral ultimately more resonant than the personas involved. Fittingly, the film leaves Ben Harper and the guard behind – there’s nary a mention of them from this point on – focusing instead on the children, their mother Willa (Shelley Winters), and their tussle with evil. As John tenderly recounts the bedtime story to Pearl, light from an outside street lantern pokes through the bedroom window, casting shadowy bars across the children; they are unwitting captives in a psychic prison, one that’s invoked by Powell. In startling fashion, Powell’s Expressionistic shadow sweeps over the room as he passes by outside, disrupting the story – John’s and the diegesis itself – a specter of the fractures he’ll inflict on this family.

Throughout, Laughton revels in backlighting places of potential sanctuary. The resultant silhouetting of these structures, however, only further obscures their effectiveness as safe houses. Laughton, ever the mischievous actor, plays the ambiguity as an intentionally cruel trick. Time and again, Laughton either cuts to the Harper home, a farmhouse barn along the river where the children take shelter for the night, or to the tree and rustic fence-lined horizon itself, all outlined with a halo of source light that, even if it had any notion of being a safe place, is seemingly too far away for the kids to scramble to anyway. Part of Hunter’s wellspring of fear, in fact, comes from the feeling that no matter how feverishly they propel themselves down the river toward the light, they may not ever reach it.

Interiors of structures don’t fare much better for the children. Like a sickness, shadows envelop John in small spaces quickly, particularly in a scene where the boy returns home, calling out for his mother. Powell slithers into the narrow hallway behind him, his shadow nearly swallowing him up. In folklore, an emergent firstborn is often portended to be a threat to the power structure; here, Powell primally sniffs at the specific danger John represents to him, the same moment, it should be noted, that John’s innocence vaporizes behind his frightened eyes. The boy realizes he has a literal monster on his tail. The film continues to unfurl from the children’s perspective, right up until the showdown at Rachel’s farmhouse, and it’s exactly these kind of “intimate observations of the children’s psychology [that] make the suspense almost unbearable” (Sragow 15).

Hunter’s set design and art direction offer a curdling uneasiness. The interior of newly married Willa Harper (latching on to any shred of companionship in the wake of Ben’s death) and Harry Powell’s bedroom comes to a steeple-like point – it evokes nothing less than the apex of a church or religious revival tent – abetted by a vast skylight on one wall that lets in shafts of light and shadow. It’s the site of Hunter’s most harrowing sequence: Willa, her spirit dampened by Powell’s brutal moralistic pontification, simultaneously realizes his true, murderous intentions and succumbs to them willingly anyway. In her increasingly dark psyche, she may see submission as a kind of salvation. Her confessional patter is the flute to Powell’s Indian cobra – he contorts and stretches his limbs toward the window’s moonlight, and then, finally, he twists his fingers around his omnipresent switchblade, bringing it down across Willa’s neck. It’s a horrifying moment, brimming with symbolic imagery of the abject frustration of marriage and the literal severing of the union between the heads of family.

The steeple design of the Harper bedroom is paralleled in a later scene: Rachel Cooper huddles her adopted children together in her room, the group framed by that same sharp peak. John and Pearl had arrived there, though, under decidedly different tones – during the warm, honest light of day. That the scene was devoid of any backlighting or sinister dichotomy of dark and light is a hint at the purity and protection that Rachel will provide. Her room’s shape, then, feels more like the actual tent of a family on a camping adventure than a jagged and oppressive manipulation.

The Night of the Hunter’s first clue that a sense of family may not be out of reach for John and Pearl comes on the wings of a Laughton flourish (and another nod to cinema’s silent era). After murdering and depositing Willa in an underwater riverbed, Powell returns to the Harper home to finally retrieve the hidden bounty he knows the kids have knowledge of. Malevolently humming “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” (another of the film’s scare tactics, sullying the purity of a beloved religious hymn), Powell calls out for the kids. They don’t respond, but the audience is privy to their whereabouts: the iris of the camera lens zooms in on their hiding spot within the frame’s background, the kids’ faces peeking out of the cellar window. It’s a filmmaker’s omniscient moment, but can just as easily be interpreted as the innate vision of the Rachel Cooper character, an entity spiritually endowed with the ability to protect children (and we’ve been visually presented with evidence of this before, in the film’s opening amongst celestial bodies). In any event, someone is looking out for John and Pearl. When the children escape down the river on their father’s skiff, narrowly slipping through the preacher’s crazed clutches, Laughton cuts to a myriad of riverbank animals “who seem to be watching over [the children] anxiously” (Rafferty 7). It’s part of the connective tissue of the children’s fable, and a remarkably effective and empathetic filmic technique; the audience is nearly “inside [the kids’] heads, dreaming a child’s dreams, part blind terror and part sweet hope” (Rafferty 7). When Rachel utters the film’s final line about the young – “They abide and they endure” – she doesn’t just mean children … she’s talking about family, too. And we want it to be true.

The opening images of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) suggest a road well traveled but in danger of extinction: 1960s America, caught in Vietnam’s moral spasms, just outside the bustling metropolitan centers of society. Barbara (Judith O’Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner) drive through a landscape filled with forest borders, increasingly dusty roads, and finally, a cemetery. This is where civilization and familial bonds say their goodbyes. Immediately, we’re presented with inter-family drama: Barbara and Johnny, on their way to drop flowers on the grave of their deceased father, bicker about how to attend to their aging mother. Johnny’s tone is confessional, and he admits he can’t even remember much about dad; his dialogue hints at his conscious distancing from the family and its resulting tension. Barbara, meanwhile, conveys more traditional notions of sticking it out, hanging onto the feeling of family. It’s telling that she’s the first in the film to be attacked and, subsequently, devoured by her zombified brother in the film’s finale.

Although the film makes her pay for it, the audience is innately inclined to relate to Barbara’s take on the vitality of family; she’s valiantly at odds with her brother’s attitude of self-preservation and contemporized apathy, attributes that the desolate Dead and Romero, too, are loathe to reward. A significant amount of the film’s anxiety derives, then, from the fact that the humans under siege can’t replicate, in any real way, a cohesive family unit strong enough to fight the onslaught of dead, who, in an ironic inverse, can operate as an almost single, fluid entity driven by the instinctive need to eat flesh.

For the film’s first act, anyway, Romero presents a set of postmodern family ideals that hold a certain harmonious promise: Duane Jones’ Ben, a black man of intellect and poise, teams with O’Dea’s Barbara – blond, delicate, and haunted – to seal off a quaint farmhouse, an adopted homestead, from the outside threat. The couple is emblematic of a sea change in the American family of the post–civil rights movement, a bold collaboration that was increasingly representative of the miasma of ethnicities America was always meant to be. But, since its citizens – and within that, families themselves – were destined to fall on one side or the other of the day’s political and social firestorms, opposition will arrive.

In keeping with the film’s terror quotient, it’s not the encroaching ghouls that present the most vicious threat to a healthy union, it’s the very real-world menace of human violence (a conceit further explored in The Walking Dead television series, another survivalist tale of forged families). Up from the basement comes volatile Harry Cooper (a remarkably coincidental union of Hunter namesakes, Harry Powell and Rachel Cooper); his wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and injured daughter Karen; and young couple Tom and Judy. Some will align to fight the good fight, while Cooper’s (Karl Hardman) roiling selfishness and cowardice provide sparks, but, in the end, “the inability of the human characters to communicate with each other, from the quarrelsome relationship between Barbara and Johnny to the unhappily married Coopers who bicker contemptuously throughout the crisis, from Barbara’s semi-catatonic state through most of the film to the running feud between Ben and Harry Cooper for leadership” (Pinedo 97) is the true source of horror. That they fail, that all of these characters (spoiler alert!) die, is as nihilistic a commentary on the breakdown of family as there’s ever been in cinema. There is no place for Barbara’s antiquated vision of familial loyalty here.

Night of the Living Dead’s art direction and sound design harken back to a time in American history where the radio – followed by the television – was a family meeting place. Ben turns to the radio first upon securing the farmhouse; it’s the device that’s playing on the car radio while Barbara and Johnny make their way to the graveyard, too. The strains of news reports will echo throughout the film, fluctuating between the back and foregrounds of the soundtrack to alternately dispense exposition and escalate tension. Romero relies less on a musical soundtrack (intermittent blasts of music punctuate, but do not dictate, Dead’s emotional story) than on that wall of ambient broadcasts, chattering talking heads that underscore the battles of the characters in the house. The cacophony of the ghouls’ groans and hammers banging on buttresses ratchet up the tension, too, an antecedent to exhaustion and madness. Ben, after boarding up the most obvious of the house’s potential entry points, collapses on the couch to gather his faculties and smoke a cigarette. As he reflects, the sounds of the night’s siege audibly recede, becoming muffled. It’s a momentary cocoon, one that Ben won’t be able to stay enveloped in for long.

The house where Dead unfolds occasionally reminds us that a real family did inhabit it. In addition to the blaring, and at this point in American culture, omnipresent, radios and television, a half-consumed corpse at the top of the stairs of the second floor is a grisly remnant of the folks once there. The tools in the basement evoke a once productive workspace, what now is a tomb where the Cooper family will ultimately meet their demise. And for nearly two acts, Dead’s farmhouse insulates its lingering human lifeforce, fulfilling the role of “a fortress to keep out the irrational, to keep out the uncanny powers that are besieging it and trying to force their way in” (Prawer 77), until the irrational (never used that term at a family holiday get-together, have you?) eventually gut the inside. One thing the divisible nature of the locale does not imply, at least when inside the womb of the house: class warfare. It simply is no longer a factor here – this apocalypse has leveled the playing field and rendered economic and social status irrelevant, echoing, if for just a brief moment, what the ‘60s sought to do to/for America. And the 1960s, your Aunt Mabel will tell you all too willingly over cobbler and ice cream, just about ripped families apart.

For a large portion of the film’s middle act, the zombie horde has little presence, instead focusing on the human drama at work. From the time Ben and Barbara board themselves in through the revelation of more survivors down below, the viewer is hunkered in with the disparate personalities, becoming, in a sense, an adopted member of this surrogate family. That urgency, that “you-are-there” quality conveyed by the intimacy of Romero’s documentary-like film grain and camerawork, is fear-generating, too; we now have enough investment in the other members of the group that we’d feel the loss if something were to happen to them. The comeuppance the viewer is apt to desire for the detestably disagreeable Harry Cooper, the cruel “older brother” of the tribe, is instead diverted to the decent young couple. Tom (Keith Wayne) and Judy (Judith Ridley), who have proven their worth as emotionally supportive and willing collaborators, perish when the group’s lone hope for transportation, the farm’s rusting truck, explodes in a gaseous firestorm. A hollow despair sets in; the couple’s “unlikely status as victims is the first intimation that something unspeakable [is] in the offing” (Spainhower 183). No one, Romero informs us, will be spared.

The camera lingers on the ghouls as they amble about, partially obscured by the litany of shadows that cut through the surrounding trees. What’s apparent, by means of slow disclosure, is that they’re now munching on Tom and Judy’s innards. If one can agree that this is an infrequent occurrence in our corporeal world, having your guts slurped up, then this sequence is the cinematic equivalent to an actual grave-robbing of a dearly departed’s corpse – a nauseating, horrifying desecration. The idea that a loved one’s final slumber could be disrupted in such a gruesome, unholy manner is another of Dead’s nihilistic, terrifying bricks in the wall (not to mention the prospect of reanimation). Romero works on his audience’s very primal, very human fear of having nothing of one’s legacy left behind; what could be worse than having your spirit and body annihilated for all time, completely consumed by history? If Dead’s dead are successful, there will be no history to speak of. Again, the black-and-white footage, both of the diegesis’s cinematography and of the news broadcasts infusing the aural/visual atmosphere, hints at the timelessness of the human struggle to rise above their own combative nature. The events of the zombie apocalypse are being recorded, just as film cameras captured the experiences of World War II (on terrifying display in the recent documentary Five Came Back), just as the Vietnam War imagery is beamed to every television in America, just as images of our triumphant and tragic past play out in the photo albums of our minds.

The most terrifying and hopeless moments in Night of the Living Dead are when human turns against human in petty, ignorant dissension, or fails to see beyond one’s own intimate, instinctive needs. When the infected, now-undead Karen (Kyra Schon) turns on her father and mother, eating him and stabbing her with a trowel – literally destroying and exterminating her own lineage, her own history – the subtext has been all but completely stripped away. The family – our collective family – is officially under attack.

Think of it: in the darkest recesses of our hearts and minds, we know our ultimate demise – the splitting of human bonds and tearing of woven cultures – will arrive not by the claws of some monstrous entity from beyond, but from our very own.

Works Cited

Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Pinedo, Isabel C. “Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film.” The Horror Film. Ed. Stephen Prince. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. N. pag. Print.

Prawer, S. S. Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror. New York: Da Capo, 1980. Print.

Rafferty, Terence. “Holy Terror.” (n.d.): n. pag. Rpt. in The Criterion Collection: Night of the Hunter. Vol. 541. New York: Criterion, 2010. 6-13. Print.

Spainhower, Mark. “George A. Romero.” Incredibly Strange Films. Ed. V. Vale and Andrea Juno. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1986. N. pag. Print.

Sragow, Michael. “Downriver and Heavenward with James Agee.” (n.d.): n. pag. Rpt. in The Criterion Collection: Night of the Hunter. Vol. 541. New York: Criterion, 2010. 14-25. Print.

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Note: Unless indicated otherwise, all images are screenshots taken from the film, which is in the public domain.