I usually try to read the book before I watch the movie. It used to be more of a steadfast rule I kept for myself, but these days I’m a lot more lax about it. I made sure to pore over every page before watching the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, No Country for Old Men, and of course Green for Danger, to name just a few. Many exceptions exist, however. When I first watched Forrest Gump as a kid I didn’t know it was even based on a novel and, from what I hear, it’s probably best to keep acting like it doesn’t exist. The Godfather trilogy I watched knowing that the cinematic mastery of the first two (not so much the third…) would probably beat having the book be my inaugural experience. One case where I do regret not reading the book first is with The Remains of the Day – the film (which I first watched around 2019) is quite excellent, but having finished the novel recently I really wish I had experienced that first. Another counterexample would be The Night of the Hunter.
Back in October, I was looking for some horror-adjacent movies to watch, and realized I had The Night of the Hunter recorded on my DVR from who knows when, so I decided to put it on. I proceeded to have my socks knocked off by one of the best-shot and best-written films I’ve ever seen. It’s a perfect mix of the film noir style, a sense of the macabre, and the fragile innocence of childhood. While it was clear to me that much of the film’s success rested on James Agee’s screenwriting (to say nothing of Laughton’s direction or the performances by Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish,) I wanted to see how the original novel compared, especially considering that it was nominated for a National Book Award.
Noir fiction, I feel, usually has either a ridiculously complicated plot (i.e. Chandler) or one that is more deceptively simple. Grubb’s novel falls into the latter. It starts with a pseudo-flashback, as Ben Harper is arrested, convicted, and executed for the murder of two bank tellers he killed during a bank robbery. During his captivity, he shares a cell with Harry Powell, a fanatically religious con man known as “Preacher”, who manages to learn from Ben’s sleep-talk that his son John knows where the money from the robbery has been hidden. Powell, a maniac of every order who has married and murdered several women in the past in order to get enough money to start a mega-church, decides he will woo Ben’s widow Willa in order to force this information out of John and his sister Pearl. Pretending to be a bona fide reverend in a small conservative West Virginia town, he wins over not just Willa, but practically the entire town. However, even after Harry and Willa are married, John is skeptical of the preacher’s veracity and his story about having been Ben’s chaplain in prison. Unfortunately for John, this means he will have to overcome both the townspeople’s shortsightedness and Powell’s murderous tendencies in order to safeguard to location of the money that his father made him swear to keep secret from everybody, even the rest of their family.
While the main villain of The Night of the Hunter is a serial killer (based off of a real guy from the 1930s, no less,) and there the plot hinges on the bank robbery in the beginning and another killing that occurs halfway through the novel, this is far from your usual whodunit or even the less clue-oriented hardboiled investigation popular in noir novels. Again, the plot is very simple – John Harper has a secret to keep, and must outwit and outrun his new crazy stepfather to protect his family and the money. What makes the simplicity of the book feel so natural is that (from a third-person perspective) the story is shown from John’s point of view, giving the events that combination of childlike wonder and innocence-shattering harshness that the film pays tribute to, such as the focus on nature during the river scenes which are duplicated in the famous film sequence, and Powell’s arrival on horse as seen by John from the barn roof where he and Pearl are sleeping.
Where the lack of complexity in the plot would otherwise cause the book to become slow and boring, Grubb’s skills in prose writing and imagery carry the story to its end. The bleak viewpoint, lack of quotation marks, and unflinching scenes of violence strike me as a proto-McCarthy style, with barely a fraction of the horror and nausea of, say, Blood Meridian or The Road. Take the opening sentence, which combines this stylistic choice with the childlike innocence that it is in constant battle with:
A child’s hand and a piece of chalk had made it: a careful, child’s scrawl of white lines on the red bricks of the wall beside Jander’s Livery Stable: a crude pair of sticks for the gallows tree, a thick broken line for the rope, and then the scarecrow of the hanging man.
The Night of the Hunter, Part One: “The Hanging Man”
In terms of other literary inspirations, the lynch mob scenes at the very end remind me very much of the explosive climax of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.
Grubb relies more on classic literary tropes than those associated with mysteries or noir fiction. The conflict is in essence one of good versus evil, with good represented by a brave and innocent child, and evil ironically represented by a “man of the cloth”. Especially with an insane preacher as one of its central characters, there is much Christian imagery and symbolism, with John comparing his own journey near the novel’s end with that of Jesus. The Biblical teachings of Powell and of Rachel Cooper (who essentially adopts John and Pearl in the book’s final act) are juxtaposed to show the false and prejudiced Christianity Powell believes as compared to the more inclusive and virtuous one Cooper teaches her adoptive family. Powell’s sermon on love and hate, which includes the infamous tattoos on his fingers, strikes an ominous chord compared to Cooper’s Bible readings to her kids which do not contain the kind of fearmongering which Powell swims in. Grubb’s symbolism is well done; the harsh reality of nature and the food chain closely mirrors the predator-prey relationship between Powell and the children. It doesn’t hurt that Grubb, who grew up in the same area he sets the novel in, describes the southern Appalachian landscape so well. Pearl’s doll, which as Grubb slowly and skillfully reveals is the location of the stolen money (which constitutes the closest thing to a mystery in the story) is a perfect representation of the dichotomy between the innocence of childhood and the realities of evil in the world which shatter it.
As I was reading, I was surprised just how much of the novel was retained in the film. The plot is almost exactly the same, besides some details which were cut out from the beginning with Ben’s time on death row, and much of the dialogue is very close to how Grubb writes it, such as Powell’s love and hate sermon, or John’s line “Don’t he never sleep?” when he spots Powell riding in on horseback. Of course, as mentioned earlier, the discordant mood set up in the book is perfectly executed by Laughton. The Night of the Hunter is definitely worth reading if you’ve already seen the film – it’s just as captivating even when one already knows how things go – and if you haven’t seen the film I’d say it is still well worth the read.
New Horizons Challenge: 16 works out of 25
Author: Davis Grubb
The Challenge Requirements so far:
2/3 works translated into English
4/3 works written in English after 1970
3/2 works that are hardboiled or noir
2/2 works written by an American minority author
1/2 works with a musical setting
Other Reviews:
Tangled Yarns 
One response to ““The Night of the Hunter” by Davis Grubb”
Indeed a great movie!
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