Night of the Hunter tells the story of a smooth-talking, charming psychopathic preacher with a nasty habit of killing women. Just like Freaks, this movie was a bit of a career-killer for the director: It bombed at the box office, and Laughton never directed another film.Īnd, like Freaks, the movie ended up becoming beloved and respected as an artistic masterpiece that failed ultimately because it was ahead of its time. Night of the Hunter, a 1955 release directed by Charles Laughton, is one of the finest films of the decade in my opinion. It was also unintentionally hilarious thanks to excellent sequences like "skull rolls aggressively down stairs," "man punts an object at a ghost/mannequin," and "man wrestles with disembodied skull as it bites his throat." So all of that was interesting to watch, in the sense that it continues a conversation with previous films we've seen. Just listen to me because I know what's best." How dare these women inconvenience their partners with their silly feminine pain, right? Time and again, we see scenarios where women have trauma in their lives – in The Screaming Skull, it's the death of her parents – and the men straight-up shut them down. In these older films, the silencing starts up before the supernatural stuff even heats up, and it stretches beyond the realm of "that's impossible." In modern movies, the narrative is often something along the lines of how the man is the logical one and the woman is superstitious (if usually vindicated once the supernatural occurrences crank up). What's interesting to me about all of these films is the way the silencing of the wife is framed. It fits right in with Gaslight and Cat People (see last chapter). The Screaming Skull fits neatly into a very old (and continuing) tradition of films where a couple start a new life together, the woman discovers that the house is haunted as shit, and the husband refuses to take her concerns seriously. But maybe he has an ulterior motive for silencing her fears. The husband, naturally, spends the movie telling her she's imagining everything. The basic plot is that a woman moves in with her old husband and starts to be terrorized by what seems to be the ghost of her husband's dead wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. I found it quite charming despite how laugh-out-loud ludicrous it becomes in places. If you prefer, there's a MST3K episode of it. It also somehow never got copyrighted (oops), so it's easy to find for free. The first was the 1958 The Screaming Skull, directed by Alex Nicol.Ī directorial debut and indie production, The Screaming Skull was not particularly well-received. (that "mad scientist" was a more culturally acceptable villain these days than "demon-worshiper" sure helped)īut before we go all-in on the monster movies and creepy sci-fi of the era, we stopped off for a pair of films neither of us had seen. The supernatural horrors of the previous decades were giving way to the rise of science fiction, fueled in large part by the events of the time: the atomic age, the cold war, the space race. The Hays Code was still exerting its influence in many ways, but it was also losing some of its hold in others. The 1950s saw a lot of changes in the horror world.
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