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Jul. 14th, 2010 10:06 pmTonight was movie night at the Bainbridge library. This month, we watched Night of the Hunter, which I had never seen before.
It is a gorgeous movie, you guys. Dark as hell, but gorgeous. It is a beautiful piece of German Expressionism, all beautiful stark silhouettes and shadows and odd angles.* The scene where
( 55-year-old spoilers ), my god, with that high peaked roof and the shadows and the framing with her in darkness on the bed and him half in the light with his arm raised! Just beautiful.
In discussion, someone talked about how the film is one long nightmare from the point of view of a child, which of course it is. But I kept being struck by how much it reminded me of a monster movie, even a slasher movie. Harry Powell is a monster: implacable, unstoppable, inexorable. So of course he can only be stopped by someone who is his opposite, someone who can turn his own tricks against him. He is properly terrifying, too - one half expects him to pop up again in the last scene, like Jason Voorhees.
I'm never sure where the line is drawn between thriller/suspense and horror. I tend to come down on the side of "horror has a supernatural element, thrillers don't."** It doesn't always work, though, and this is one of those times. This feels like horror to me. And damned good horror at that.
*Someone else in discussion complained about how the film felt stagy and artificial, that the dialogue is unrealistic, and that you could too easily tell when it was filmed in a studio. And everything he cited were things that I had loved about the film. But then, I'm often a fan of artificiality in film, especially when the artificiality serves to create a feeling of surreality as it does here. I don't need film to be realistic - that's what I have real life for.
**So, for instance, I can never manage to mentally classify Psycho as a horror film. Psycho is a suspense film and a damned good one but it never feels like horror to me. The Birds, now...
It is a gorgeous movie, you guys. Dark as hell, but gorgeous. It is a beautiful piece of German Expressionism, all beautiful stark silhouettes and shadows and odd angles.* The scene where
( 55-year-old spoilers ), my god, with that high peaked roof and the shadows and the framing with her in darkness on the bed and him half in the light with his arm raised! Just beautiful.In discussion, someone talked about how the film is one long nightmare from the point of view of a child, which of course it is. But I kept being struck by how much it reminded me of a monster movie, even a slasher movie. Harry Powell is a monster: implacable, unstoppable, inexorable. So of course he can only be stopped by someone who is his opposite, someone who can turn his own tricks against him. He is properly terrifying, too - one half expects him to pop up again in the last scene, like Jason Voorhees.
I'm never sure where the line is drawn between thriller/suspense and horror. I tend to come down on the side of "horror has a supernatural element, thrillers don't."** It doesn't always work, though, and this is one of those times. This feels like horror to me. And damned good horror at that.
*Someone else in discussion complained about how the film felt stagy and artificial, that the dialogue is unrealistic, and that you could too easily tell when it was filmed in a studio. And everything he cited were things that I had loved about the film. But then, I'm often a fan of artificiality in film, especially when the artificiality serves to create a feeling of surreality as it does here. I don't need film to be realistic - that's what I have real life for.
**So, for instance, I can never manage to mentally classify Psycho as a horror film. Psycho is a suspense film and a damned good one but it never feels like horror to me. The Birds, now...
