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The most harrowing film ever made about childhood opens with
a lullaby that is anything but soothing: “The hunter in the night / Fills your
childish heart with fright / Fear is only a dream / So dream, little one,
dream.”  As we stand on the threshold of
Charles Laughton’s haunted masterpiece Night
of the Hunter, this lullaby sings us into the world of a scared child who,
strangely, is being encouraged to dream a dream of fear, which is a fair
description of the film that follows. While
Night of the Hunter wonderfully
defies classification, blending elements of expressionism, gothic, fairy tale,
and film noir, I would like to offer a reading of the film as a very particular
kind of horror film, one that enables us to see the world from a victim’s point
of view. Such films are anything but
empowering, in the sense used by the kind of self-help guides and memoirs of
personal struggle that litter our nation’s bookshelves. Rather, these films teach us sympathy and
compassion through a humbling sense of disempowerment,
which, in the case of Night of the Hunter,
involves taking us back to the horrors of childhood.

The tale is set in West Virginia during the Depression, and
the scarcity of those times drives the cruel deeds that unfold. We first see little Pearl and John Harper playing
happily in their yard when suddenly their father appears, on the run from the
police for a bank job in which two people were killed. He thrusts the stolen money on young John, which
will soon make him the object of murderous greed. Fear is John’s inheritance, yet the film
implies that even children who don’t experience his and his sister’s unique
form of persecution are born to suffer. Later in the film, as they flee from danger, they are forced to beg for
food along with other children. Their
grudging benefactor gives them each a potato before shooing them off, as she
muses: “Such times: when young’uns run the roads….” Near the end of the film,
when their guardian, Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), recites the story of Herod’s
slaughter of the innocents, she reflects: “It did seem like it was a plague
time for little ones, those olden days, those hard, hard times.” The film subtly parallels “those olden days”
with the “hard, hard times” of the Depression Era, and in its prolific use of
fairy tale motifs, connects this with the struggling peasant culture that
spawned the classic folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

Although oral folk tales were traditionally recited to old
and young alike, they have a special resonance for children because of their
prominent place in the narratives, a place that is, as we all remember, often
terrifying. Whether being abandoned by
one’s parents in the woods because there isn’t enough food to go around, like
Hansel and Gretel, or being chopped up and fed to father in a stew, like the
child victim in “The Juniper Tree,” the children of fairy tales have much to
fear, especially from their parents. Once their father burdens them with the secret location of $10,000 in
stolen bank money, John and Pearl Harper’s story enters the dark dream world of
the fairy tale as they are pursued by Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a sinister
self-anointed preacher who is alluded to several times as “a wolf in sheep’s
clothing.” Yet the children are the only
ones able to see Harry Powell for the Big, Bad Wolf that he really is, and Night of the Hunter deftly captures that
sense of powerlessness all of us felt when, as children, we sensed something
wrong but weren’t able to do anything about it.

The film is a virtual catalogue of iconic images of
childhood fears: closed basement doorways, crescent moons in night skies, empty
barns, shadowy attics, dark forests, and treacherous swamps make up Night of the Hunter’s haunted
landscapes. One of the film’s most
frightening scenes takes place in the Harpers’ basement, when Powell drags the
children down to help him find the stolen money. When the supposed cache turns out to be
empty, he turns viciously on John, who manages to extinguish the light and
overturn a shelf of canning jars on the villain’s head. Powell’s usually sly, seductive patter turns suddenly
into an animalistic wail. In the claustrophobic darkness of the basement, this
transformation is especially chilling, recalling many a downstairs journey and the accompanying fears.  The children
flee up the stairs, shot expressionistically as a thin
corridor of angular light hanging in a sea of blackness.  As in many scenes, the light and dark contrast here
is so strong as to make the image look like an old woodcut illustration. The children barely escape, slamming the
basement door, as vicious animal growls emerge from behind it.  As he continues relentlessly pursuing them as
they flee downriver, at one point John hears him singing his signature hymn,
“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and wonders, “Don’t he never sleep?”  Fairy tale threats never do: they only take
on new forms as we grow older.

It’s striking to note that this film was produced amidst the
optimism and economic recovery of the nineteen-fifties, and perhaps this is why
the film initially flopped. Though
dream-like and fanciful, it nevertheless presents an unpleasant reminder of
hard times that remained all too real in the memories of older filmgoers.  Seen now, this classic takes on new life as a
dark fairy tale for an age of austerity. The world we are entering will indeed be, as the children’s guardian,
Rachel Cooper, says, “a hard world for little things.” Yet, given the grim outlook for our
collective future, it seems surprising that so many people remain so eager to
bring more little things into it. It is
this, as much as the perversely self-satisfied culture of child-rearing, that
inspired my previous piece on the film Who
Can Kill a Child? 

Climate scientists recently announced that we’ve reached a
dreaded milestone for CO2 levels, an announcement that received surprisingly
little attention.  But last year a
similar, and to my mind even more disturbing, milestone was passed, and some
actually considered it, perversely, as a cause for celebration. On March 12, 2012 the world population reached
seven billion, and while we might hope for a future in which this growing
population will be able to reduce its carbon footprint, there is no denying the
simple fact that more people means more mouths to feed, and if the wasteful way
we produce our food doesn’t change in a drastic way, those little mouths are
going to be very hungry. This is one of the things I think of when I hear
Rachel Cooper’s words during the Christmas scene that ends Night of the Hunter: “Lord save little children.  You’d think the world’d be ashamed to name
such a day as Christmas for one of them, then go on in the same old way. My
soul is humble when I see the way little ones accept their lot.”

The triumph of Laughton’s masterpiece is to make us
similarly humble by imaginatively putting us in the vulnerable position of
children.  It is a vulnerability they
share with other creatures, a point clearly established in the film’s most
memorable scene: John and Pearl’s nighttime flight down the Ohio River. As they pass a series of animals on the
Ohio’s banks—frogs, owls, turtles, foxes—they eventually come to a herd of
sheep corralled behind a fence. Time
hangs suspended as the children and the sheep stare at one another, sharing a
mutual recognition that the film has prepared us for by frequently referring to
John and Pearl as “little lambs.” This
mutual recognition anticipates the later scene of Powell’s capture by police,
when John cries out in pain at his former persecutor’s suffering. He later refuses to testify against him at
the trial, with compassion which stands in stark contrast to the vengefulness of the
townspeople, who form a lynch mob bent on Powell’s blood.  It is the virtue of great horror movies to
remind us what it was like to be a child, and to sympathetically identify with
victims, whatever their age might be.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Having
children is one of those bourgeois activities that leave me baffled, like
playing golf, eating sushi, or watching Downton Abbey.  Although I remain on speaking terms with
friends who, regretfully, choose to have children, there’s no denying the gulf
that separates the baby-haves and the baby-have-nots. And there’s nothing like the chill that grips
me when couples my wife and I have known for years, and who always claimed they
would remain child-free, suddenly announce: “We’re going to have a baby!”  From that point on all previous conversations
about how annoying kids are will be forgotten, to be replaced with the silent
assumption: yes, but ours are different. 
At such moments I turn to horror films for solace, and while Village of the Damned, The Brood, and The Omen all help, there’s only one film that truly captures the
experience of being trapped in a world of children and those who adore them.

Who Can Kill a Child (1976) is a
relatively obscure Spanish horror film directed by Narcisco Ibanez Serrador,
but it should be much better known, and not only by people like me, who are sick
of having to pretend to be awed by how wonderful children are. It is a challenging, confrontational work
that raises difficult questions concerning overpopulation, inequality, and the
nature of evil. The film tells the story
of an English couple vacationing on the Spanish coast as they enjoy their last
weeks of freedom before a very pregnant Evelyn gives birth to their third
child.  Distracted by the noise and
crowds of Benavis, where a festival is being held, they rent a boat and go
alone to the island of Almanzora, which they find strangely deserted, except
for occasional bands of vacantly smiling children, who grow increasingly
threatening, and eventually homicidal. While the premise is admittedly unoriginal, if tantalizing, the power of
the narrative emerges through its sense of quiet unease, complex character
development, and provocative intrusions of topical and historical sound bytes
into the film’s otherwise eerily isolated world.

Taking its cue from the Mondo Cane films—those
pseudo-documentary films of the sixties and seventies that shocked audiences
with their depiction of violent rituals and grotesque behavior from around the
world—Who Can Kill a Child’s opening
credit sequence runs over a disturbing montage of twentieth-century atrocities,
beginning with the Holocaust and spiraling through numerous wars and civil
conflicts, in each case emphasizing the overwhelming toll on children.  Disturbingly, the sound of children’s
laughter can be heard over the grim stock footage, as well as a child humming a
haunting melody reminiscent of Krzysztof Komeda’s indelible theme to Rosemary’s Baby. As the death roll finally reaches its height, we cut to black and white footage of barely clad children crouching
in the dirt, which seems to signal another abject image of orphaned destitution
until the camera pulls back, transforming to bright color footage of a beach
crowded by leisurely European tourists. This striking contrast
underscores the film’s later meditations on the thin borderlines between
comfort and chaos.

As Evelyn
and her husband Tom later enjoy the spectacle of a local parade, they discover
that their camera has run out of film and duck into a shop.  As they wait for the clerk to bring their
rolls of Kodak, they turn to a television on the counter, broadcasting
footage of a massacre in Bangkok. When
the clerk returns, he shrugs and observes: “The world is crazy. In the end the ones who suffer the most are
the children. From war: the
children. From famine: the children.” It
is an observation that will echo in the English couple’s minds as their
vacation continues. After making this
morose speech, however, the clerk smiles and says: “What a lovely day to take
pictures!” In the following scene, disturbingly enough,
Evelyn wades in the ocean while Tom tries to snap her picture. The thin membrane between the first world
privilege that safeguards their “lovely day” and the disorder that lurks beyond
their borders is suddenly broken by an ambiguous disturbance in the distance, a
disturbance that is later revealed to be a body washing ashore. These early scenes are loaded with many such
moments of horror lurking just beyond the vacationers’ perception.

The answer to the question of why a film that is about to present us with packs of homicidal
children is so preoccupied with reminding us how vulnerable children are in a
treacherously unstable global economy remains ambiguous, but some hints seem to
be given in the conversations between Tom and Evelyn on the night before their boat
trip.  As they walk down a crowded
street, Tom asks, “Would you like to sit down?” and she replies, “Where, it’s
so crowded.”  Looking down at her
pregnant belly, he observes: “Well, we’re not helping the situation, are
we?”  Later, as Tom broods over the
events of the day, he recounts a story from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita about a man who kills his two children, his wife, and
later himself. When Evelyn asks why, he
answers, “I imagine he was trying to save his children from the future.”  This prompts his wife to mention that they
were almost going to “kill this one,” pointing to her belly, and asks if he’s
glad they didn’t.  Tom doesn’t seem
entirely sure, and he equivocates that they had two children already, before
reassuring his wife as they go to sleep. 
Such scenes suggest a certain parallel, if not complicity, between their
household population and the rest of the world’s.  Overpopulation, the film indicates, is a problem we like to
project onto other countries when it often happens under our very noses, and it
is our privileged, first world children who are going to leave the largest
carbon footprint, and consume the most resources, indirectly fueling the
violent conflicts that hover around drought and famine like flies.

All this
might seem like a rather ponderous set-up for a horror film, but what is
astonishing is how deftly these elements are woven into the fast-paced establishing
shots. Soon we find ourselves on the
island of Almanzera, where we enter a very different reality. From the raucous crowds of the mainland we
shift to an almost silent, dreamlike space reminiscent of Val Lewton’s great
noir-thrillers of the 1940s, like I
Walked with a Zombie, and Isle of the
Dead, but with one significant difference: while classic horror films use
darkness as their medium of fear, Who Can
Kill a Child uses light, an almost blinding, stark Mediterranean light, as
relentless and omnipresent as the increasing sense of menace to which it seems
tied. Like a mischievous child, the film
plays hide and go seek with the violence lurking just behind every corner. One particularly disturbing scene shows
Evelyn calling Tom’s attention to an old man huddled in a doorway in a distant
angle of a narrow but brightly lit street. A girl appears in the distance, smiling pleasantly as she walks towards
them. Once she reaches the old man she
looks happily to her right at him, though we still can’t see anything more than
his arm holding a cane. After smiling
guilelessly towards the couple, whose point of view the camera shares, she
turns to the man again, seizes his cane, and sets to beating him violently to
death, though we only see the evidence of this from the increasing amount of
red visible on the cane as it repeatedly rises and falls and the girl laughs
with glee.

Such
moments of barely concealed horror parallel the couple’s reluctance in
admitting the children’s monstrousness, a reluctance shared by another adult
whom they encounter, who tells them the story of how the children suddenly
changed. As he describes how they killed his wife, he notes with amazement that
nobody moved to stop them, because, of course, “who can kill a child?” It is an
understandable reluctance that the English couple have a hard time getting
over, putting them in even graver danger. As the film progresses towards its harrowing conclusion, it forces the
viewer into the uncomfortable position of the protagonists: though the children
are often shown blank-faced and coldly malevolent, there are also many scenes
where they are depicted as infinitely charming, seemingly innocent.  When they nevertheless show themselves
capable of horrendous violence, we are tempted to ask, along with Evelyn,
“Isn’t a normal child incapable of killing another human being?”  When we recall how violent the 1970s were,
this line has a disturbing historical resonance.  It’s sad to think there was once a time when
adults could be so innocent as to ask such a question.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.