In order to do that, he begins to ingratiate himself into the Harper’s former family. When Harper won’t tell him where he hid the money, Powell bides his time, and upon release from jail and finding out that his cellmate is scheduled for execution sets about finding just where that money went. The police have been unable to find the money and Powell becomes obsessed with it. In jail, he meets Ben Harper (Peter Graves), a man on trial for murdering two people and stealing $10,000 from them. Powell is arrested at that very club and taken to jail for 30 days because it was discovered that he was driving a stolen vehicle. You don’t have to be a devoted student of Freud to put those images together.
As he becomes more entranced by her, his left hand–tattooed with the word “hate”–suddenly clinches into a fist, reaches into his coat pocket, and seconds later the blade on his switchblade suddenly cuts through the fabric of his coat. This man with his warped religion equates arousal with the desire to kill, and it is even suggested later on that he might be sexually impotent, but we’ll get to that in a moment.Įarly in the film, Powell is in a burlesque house watching a dancer. Powell’s psychology and psychopathy are interestingly laid out by Laughton. In the film, Harry Powers became Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a traveling and clearly psychopathic “preacher”–complete with tattoos of the word “love” on one hand and “hate” on the other–who marries widows, takes them for everything they’re worth, and then disposes of them. Grubb mined the terror of those murders for his novel and Agee deftly transferred those same raw emotions to his screenplay. Soon after they were wed, Powers began posting his own ads, courting numerous women, convincing them to withdraw money from their bank accounts, and then murdering them in a small garage he built near their home. Born in the Netherlands, Powers moved to Iowa in 1910 with his parents and then later to West Virginia where he met his wife through a “Lonely Hearts” personal ad.
Grubb’s novel, you see, was based on real-life serial killer Harry Powers. The Night of the Hunter is one of the most intense, terrifying thrillers that I’ve ever seen, and it’s when you dig deeper into the story and its origins that all of that begins to make sense. Sound like a dime-store novel, doesn’t it? “A religious fanatic marries a gullible widow whose young children are reluctant to tell him where their real daddy hid $10,000 he’d stolen in a robbery. Indeed, if you only read the first available synopsis on the film’s IMDb page, you might pass right by it on the search for something scary.
Directed by Charles Laughton ( The Old Dark House) and written by James Agee–based on the novel by Davis Grubb– The Night of the Hunter may not, on its surface or from a vague synopsis, sound much like a horror film.
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