Psycho is generally thought of as the first slasher. That honor could be given to Charles Laughton’s chillingly lyrical Night of the Hunter. Released in 1955—70 years ago this month— Hunter can be seen as a refutation, or reversal of Hitchcock’s classic which wouldn’t appear until five years later. Where Hitchcock locates horror in mothers, queer people, and a disordering of the patriarchal order, Laughton’s killer is the Christian patriarch himself. The hunter in the film isn’t some stranger or outsider. It’s the father, and a world in which fathers are assumed to be as righteous as the bloody hand of God.
The film’s set in rural West Virginia during the Great Depression. Harry Powell (a menacing Robert Mitchum) poses as a traveling preacher the better to marry, rob, and murder widows. He’s arrested for stealing a car and lands in the same cell as Ben Harper (Peter Graves) a man who stole $10,000 (and murdered two men) in a bank robbery.
After Harper’s execution, Powell stalks and marries his widow Willa (Shelly Winters), while trying to get the children John (child actor Billy Chapin) and Grace (Sally Jane Bruce) to reveal the location of the money. Inevitably, Powell murders Willa, and the two children flee down the river, until they’re rescued by indomitable orphan-collector Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish).
The film’s highly stylized; Laughton uses stark black and white expressionist compositions which make the world vibrate with a watchful emptiness. The children’s journey down the river in particular is a masterpiece of ominous stillness; the camera zooms in on a frog or a turtle moving along the bank, small creatures making their way through their own small lives, unaware of the forces around them. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Mrs. Cooper muses as we watch a hawk swoop down on a rabbit.
Who is it who’s hard on the little things, though? The owl suggests it’s nature, red in tooth and claw. But the film offers other possibilities. When the giant shadow of Powell’s black preacher’s hat appears on the shade of the children’s room, it feels like an evil divinity is watching over them. Similarly, as Powell follows the children down the river, riding astride his horse, singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” in his resonant baritone, John asks in despair, “Don’t he ever sleep?” God sees all, even to the frog and the rabbit and all the little things waiting to be destroyed.
You could argue that Powell’s Christianity is a twisted form; he is, as the film itself suggests, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, a devil quoting scripture. But Powell’s masquerade of Christianity isn’t just a masquerade; people take him as a good man because the Christianity he espouses is one that resonates with their own.
For example, Icey Spoon (Evelyn Varden), Willa’s boss at the candy store, insists that Willa needs to marry right away to fit patriarchal norms. Then, after Powell murders her and says she’s run away, Ivey’s eager to hear him tell her about how sinful and drunken and evil her friend is. Finally, when she discovers Powell’s a killer, she leads the howling lynch mob, eager to dispense righteous violence with no guilt at all for the role she played in the Willa’s death or the children’s trauma. For Ivey as for Powell, Christianity is a way to revel in her own righteousness while reveling in her capacity to meddle, hate, and harm.
Ivey also responds to Powell’s Christianity because she shares with him a misogynist distaste for women, and for women’s sexuality in particular. Powell has no problem with robbery, cruelty and violence, but he loathes women and sex. While watching a woman gyrate in a men’s club, he mutters about how God hates, “Perfume-smelling things. Lacey things. Things with curly hair." While he delivers those lines, he pops his pocket knife—the blade tears through his pocket, neatly conflating arousal with hatred and violence.
On his honeymoon night with Willa, Powell tells her that sex for purposes other than procreation is evil, and shames her for wanting to find pleasure with her husband. Even when she discovers that Powell married her for the cash, Willa’s so convinced of his godliness that she refuses to defend herself or her children, lying frozen on her bed, staring into space as Powell drives the phallic knife home. It’s not really the knife that kills her though; it’s the norms of Christian patriarchy, which led her to marry a pastor and obliterate herself in the name of loyalty, subordination, and God.
This isn’t to say the film is anti-Christian. Rather, Laughton presents Christianity as contested—like the words “HATE” and “LOVE” which Powell has tattooed on his hands, so he can tell a parable of the struggle between good and evil by having them wrestle with each other. In perhaps the most famous scene of the film, Powell lurks outside Mrs. Cooper’s house, while she sits in the front room with a rifle. He starts to sing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arm,” turning the song into a threat. She responds by joining in—though the same chorus, for her, expresses a determination to protect the weak rather than prey on them. The spirit, the song, isn’t the tune, nor even the words. It’s what you do with it.
The bleak insight that the Christian patriarchs hate women and children and want to kill us all certainly resonates today as Christo-fascist ghouls like Mike Johnson, Kristi Noem, and Trump systematically destroy the safety net. Onscreen, though, few slashers follow in Powell’s black-shod footsteps. Most of the monsters are more like Norman Bates—men who have in one way or another failed at being patriarchs, and are dangerous because they’re outsiders, deviants, freaks. Buffalo Bill is trans, Freddie is deformed, Michael and Jason are wounded child-men, the family members in Texas Chainsaw Massacre are mentally disabled to varying degrees. And virtually none of the major slasher villains are pious; they worship the Devil, if they worship anyone.
Powell’s also less invulnerable, and less competent, than a lot of more contemporary slashers. Mrs. Cooper is the real force; “I’m a strong tree with branches for many birds,” she says with pride. Meanwhile the good-looking, righteous preacher bullies kids and whines with fear when one of his victims has the wherewithal to fight back.
White male cowards who carry the cross, though, can do a lot of harm, since even their victims tend to assume that God’s on their side. Slashers since Hitchcock have sided with Powell in pillorying everyone but the good patriarch. Seventy years on, though, we’re still waiting in that darkened house, listening to the same hunter’s Christian song.