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Does the boogeyman exist?
Once upon a time, there were two children, John and Pearl, the children of a poor man who one unfortunate day decided to commit a robbery in which a man was killed. Hunted by the police, poor Ben Harper (that was the name of the ill-fated outlaw), decided to hide the loot so that the two children, once grown up, could use it to live happily with their mother. Sure, Ben had still committed a crime, and that money was undeniably the cause of a man's death, but at least his act would bring something good. And so he did: he hid the loot in the only place where he thought no one would dream of looking, and just before being arrested, he made John, who was the elder of the two, swear that never, for any reason in the world, and at the cost of his own life, he would reveal the hiding place. Fate, as we know, can be terrible with children sometimes, and so poor Ben was sent to kick the air hanging on a gallows, not before, however, having made the unpleasant acquaintance of a character as strange as he was dangerous: Reverend Harry Powell, an ambiguous and unsettling shepherd of souls, ended up in jail for a simple car theft (or so it seemed...). It so happened that one of the last nights before the execution, poor Ben let slip something, something he had managed to keep to himself despite the interrogations: the loot was hidden somewhere, and the children knew where. Thus poor Ben left this earth of soil and stones, not knowing that, because of him, the boogeyman had awakened and was now on the trail of his children.
The boogeyman exists. Oh yes. This seems to be what Charles Laughton wants to tell us with his directorial debut (year 1955): the boogeyman is cunning, he sneaks into our home, seduces those we love with lies and slyness. He lurks in disguise, in the guise of a preacher who harbors in his mind a God created in his image and likeness, bloodthirsty and vengeful, ordering him to kill to satisfy his thirst for money ("Who's next, Lord? Another widow? How many have there been so far? Six? Or twelve? How many widows with a nice little nest egg in their pockets..."). A preacher with the sly and serene face of Robert Mitchum (exceptional), a charismatic crowd charmer, an expert seducer of sinners. Evil. And a killer. Who has the words Love and Hate tattooed on his fingers. He is just one of the many contrasts, the many oppositions of this film: an apparent and ostentatious brightness that hides the shadow that devours other shadows (ingenious is Powell's arrival at the Harper house, with the shadow of the first "eating" that of little John), the Devil disguised as a man of God opposed to the figure of the father of the two children: the criminal, the fugitive who prefers to die rather than fail to ensure a future for Pearl and John. Two fathers who seem to face off in the boy's mind in a race that could risk compromising even his mental stability to win his unconditional trust.
Right around the mental processes that develop in the young protagonist's mind lies one of the most interesting and, given the year of production, innovative aspects of the entire film: an almost psychoanalytic approach to the typical thriller register. John is deeply traumatized by his father's arrest. The images of the policemen taking him away handcuffed, the man's cries, the oath to which he is bound at the cost of his life are simply too much for a child of his age. He is old enough to understand the gravity of the situation and the importance of what he has promised, but not enough to face Evil in person, a ruthless man who (consistent with the almost fairy-tale register of the narrative), seems at one point even endowed with superhuman powers ("Doesn't he ever sleep?!" an exasperated and despairing John lets out, due to the preacher's tenacity), a killer willing to do anything to make him confess, to make him break his commitment. Not only that. In the protagonist's mind, the promise made to his father gradually dresses in meanings and contents even more intense and violent (when his little sister asks him to tell her a story, John recounts the deeds of a king who, just before being captured by his enemies, "told his son to kill anyone who tried to steal his treasure"). So much so that only when he is confronted with the same scene that struck him so much, only by reliving the same trauma will he be able to break that seal he has kept inside for too long and shout his secret to the world.
From a technical and narrative perspective, Laughton decides to overturn what are the usual directing times of the thriller. The beginning is abrupt; virtually all the preliminaries of the genre are omitted. There is no real introduction to the main characters (Powell reveals his nature as a murderer in the very first shot, John and Pearl themselves appear on screen without any "introduction," the children's mother arrives when everything is already over), and the story immediately gets to the heart of the matter: the preacher manages to settle in the Harper house, and the nightmare begins for the two little ones. Here's yet another opposition: the house, the nest, normally a symbol of protection and shelter, becomes the den of the wolf, the place where danger is greatest, where more than anywhere else John and Pearl are at the mercy of the boogeyman. Mother's large bed, where we usually take refuge when bad dreams come to visit us, ends up being the stage of the most cruel of the evil preacher's pantomimes, the place where the most atrocious of crimes is committed.
Like every fairy tale worth its salt, salvation, if it can be called that, will come thanks to the help of a good fairy, with the face of an elderly woman armed with a rifle, brusque manners, and a heart of gold (the nemesis of the boogeyman, in short, who uses God's word to educate and grow the little men and women she gathers around her, not to justify the nefarious acts of her deeds). It will be the old and wise Rachel who gives John two objects of great symbolic value: a watch and an apple, a sign that it is time to gather the fruits life has ripened, that it is time for the child to leave behind the monsters of childhood and become a man.
"The Night of the Hunter" was a failure as seldom seen in the history of cinema. The elements of atypicality proved to be excessively daring that alienate it from the classic thriller: the setting (rural and sunny of the southern states, in the style of Mark Twain, though much of the story takes place at night), the blend of thriller and fairy tale, the not-so-concealed criticism of certain puritanism (Powell's refusal to consummate the marriage), the religious zealotry that blinds and prevents seeing the evil that can lurk in men of the church (as happens to Mrs. Spoon). It would take many years for critics (even Truffaut himself has never hidden his great appreciation for this film), before even the audience realized what they had missed. Probably today, we are a bit late, and the risk is to quickly label this film as outdated.
The solution, perhaps, lies in staying alone, at night, watching the sequence in which Powell chases the two children armed with a knife along the riverbank, observing the anger and frustration painted in his eyes, and, in all honesty, asking oneself: "does the boogeyman exist?"
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