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# Can't Kill the World
- URL: https://www.jamesreeves.co/night-of-the-hunter/
- Published: 2022-05-06T01:18:36.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-15T03:49:00.000Z
- Description: The Night of the Hunter opens with the disembodied heads of five children floating in the cosmos and gets weirder from there.
- Author: James A. Reeves
- Tags: Notebook

Charles Laughton’s [*The Night of the Hunter*](https://www.criterion.com/films/27525-the-night-of-the-hunter?ref=jamesreeves.co) (1955) opens with the disembodied heads of five children floating in the cosmos and gets weirder from there.

When we meet Robert Mitchum’s murderous preacher, he’s puttering along in a stolen car, talking to God. “Sometimes I wonder if you really understand,” he says. “Not that you mind the killing. Your book is full of killing. But there are things you do hate, Lord. Perfume-smellin’ things. Lacy things. Things with curly hair. There are too many of them. Can’t kill the world.”

This is a drive through America’s puritanical brainpan, a freaky portrait of the neurotic Christian obsession with sex, its hatred of women, and how dogma can be honed into violence. When Mitchum ogles a stripper, a switchblade erupts in his pocket.

Then style enters the scene: the love/hate tattoos that inspired [Radio Raheem’s four-finger rings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1updTZ2JTw&ref=jamesreeves.co); a bedroom that belongs in [*The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari*](https://theconversation.com/100-years-of-the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari-the-film-that-inspired-virginia-woolf-david-bowie-and-tim-burton-131899?ref=jamesreeves.co) with its brute angles and unnatural light; midnight scenes along the river unfold beneath the stillborn skies of a soundstage; a woman’s watery grave looks like a snapshot from a dream.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/85/bb/85bbc222-eb2e-4bcf-8b92-f241768e9260/content/images/wordpress/2022/05/Night-of-the-Hunter-II-1000x666.jpg)

As if skittish of the dark terrain it maps, the second half of the film retreats into a Scooby-Doo mood. Mitchum threatens precocious children and hunts down a rag-doll stuffed with cash, which becomes comic until Lilian Gish lays down the hammer between speeches about Moses and the Massacre of the Innocents. It’s a gothic sprawl of the sinister and the absurd, much of it soaked in Biblical verse punctuated by the occasional startling line: “And that slit in her throat, like she had an extra mouth.” This uneasy combination of the profane, the ridiculous, and the pious leaves *The Night of the Hunter* nattering at the mind—perhaps because we know faith can fuel all three conditions.