• Home
  • Big screen classics
  • The Night of the Hunter + intro by Jason Wood, BFI Director of Public Programme and Audiences

The Night of the Hunter

+ intro by Jason Wood, BFI Director of Public Programme and Audiences

Laughton’s remarkable Depression-era fable about innocent children caught up in a battle between good and evil.

  • Director

    Charles Laughton

  • With

    Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish, Shelley Winters, Billy Chapin

  • USA 1955. 92min

  • Digital

  • Certificate

    12A

Laughton’s sole film as director is a wonderfully imaginative but faithful adaptation of Davis Grubb’s novel, set during the Depression, about two children menaced by a murderously psychopathic preacher (Mitchum) who marries their widowed mother in the hope of landing himself a fortune. Stanley Cortez’s cinematography combines fairy tale, American pastoral and pure nightmare, while Gish and Mitchum are formidably evocative of good and evil.

See other screenings of this film.