Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is an unshakable film for me. It contains one of my all time favorite scenes, a dreamlike journey down a river that involves two children and a particularly haunting song written by the film’s composer, Walter Schumann. It is the turning point in the film, and leads us into the surreal.

The story revolves around a preacher, Henry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who travels from town to town, seducing and killing women. We’re warned in the opening scene, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” It’s from Matthew chapter seven. The camera hovers in a Godlike position above a house somewhere in the South. We move in closer to see children huddling around the door to the cellar, where the legs of a dead woman are sprawled out across the steps. The first of many immortal images from the film.

Mitchum’s larger than life performance is extraordinary. He is a false prophet, yes, but in his twisted mind he believes he is doing the right thing. When asked what religion he ascribes to, he responds, “The one I worked out betwist the big man and myself.” He sings old spiritual songs with a hearty baritone, frequently prays out loud, and encourages those around him to confront their sins. He is a classic fake.

In one of the early scenes of the film, Powell is arrested for stealing a car. While in prison, he finds himself sharing a cell with Ben Harper, a man who is to be hanged for murder. He learns that Ben hid a significant sum of money from a robbery somewhere around his house.

Once Powell is released and Ben is dead, he travels to Ben’s hometown in effort to find the money. In another unforgettable sequence from the film, we see a train speeding along the track, dark smoke billowing out. The devil is coming to town.

Ben’s widow, Willa, is played by Shelley Winters as a lonely and desperate woman, though not so lonely and desperate as her character in Kubrick’s Lolita. The children, John and Pearl, observe the situation from a distance, and become our perspective in the tale.

We begin to realize that Powell has a deep-seated hate for women. He despises them, perhaps because he was wronged by a lover, or because his mother abandoned him when he was a child. Willa marries him, but he refuses to consummate the marriage. Instead, he encourages her to purge herself of her need for carnal gratification. We watch as she helps him lead a revival, huge torches blazing in the foreground. Powell’s religion is the kind that leads straight to the gates of hell.

The Night of the Hunter is part horror, part comedy, part dream. It’s not hard to believe it was a flop when it was released in 1955. In many ways it was ahead of its time. Its dark tone and expressionistic images were similar to the film noir movies being made at the time, but its subject matter was darker.

Consider another immortal image from the film: a car at the bottom of a lake, a murdered woman strapped in the driver’s seat, her hair floating above her. Later a character describes the slit in her throat as looking like “a second mouth”.

The women in the film are ignorant and naive, stupid enough to fall for Powell’s schemes. When Willa finds a switchblade in the pocket of his coat, she just smirks and says, “Men.” Has Laughton designed this to be a cautionary tale for women?

In the second half of the film, we are introduced to Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), an old woman who cares for destitute children. Her character stands as the antithesis to the other women in the film, and to Powell - a woman of genuine faith who seeks to preserve life rather than destroy it. She is strong, loving, and without a gullible bone in her body.

And so we have this theme of dualism that runs throughout the film. Good vs evil, genuineness vs artificiality, men vs women, etc.

There’s more to be said about the film. I realize I haven’t touched enough on another key theme of the film - the resilience of children. “They abide,” as Cooper says. But I’ll bring this to a close. Let me just say that The Night of the Hunter is one of the most interesting films I’ve ever seen. It has influenced me tremendously as a filmmaker, and I will continue to return to it to be haunted, touched, and dazzled by its images.