"When I first came to town, in 1989, I was hired to work on a sitcom starring Robert Mitchum. Yes, really. And at the first writers’ meeting, I mentioned to the more senior staff members that I was kind of excited to meet him. Well, most of the other writers had never seen Mitchum in anything, so I invited them over to watch a video of The Night of the Hunter, arguably one of the great pieces of art in movie history. It’s somewhat surreal and heightened and theatrical, and they laughed at it. I knew then I was in a world of trouble. It’s the only movie directed by Charles Laughton and one of the only screenplays written by James Agee. Mitchum is an evil “religious” fraud, and Lillian Gish is the embodiment of good. The movie scares you, then makes you cry at how beautiful it is. The sitcom was cancelled after seven episodes."

"Charles Laughton’s only film as director, scripted by James Agee from the book by Davis Grubb. It’s a fairy-tale version of a crime-suspense drama, as two children are pursued through a magical, haunted landscape by a demented yet canny preacher (Robert Mitchum). There’s a grown-up story about a stash of stolen money, but Laughton’s masterstroke is to ignore that and present the human monster from the children’s point of view, as a remorseless bogeyman."

"I was twenty years old when I first saw it. It terrified me then, and still does.
 The preacher, played by Robert Mitchum, is the most frightening
 psychopath I’ve ever seen depicted. This is the only film directed by Charles Laughton, and its haunting, over-the-top storytelling is reminiscent of Laughton’s own character portrayals. The poetic, expressionistic images are by Stanley Cortez, a true American master who I fortunately came to know many years before his death. Stanley photographed, among others, The Magnificent Ambersons and The Three Faces of Eve, in which his lighting is equally unique. The disturbing orchestral score is by Walter Schumann, who also wrote the Dragnet theme and whose music underlines and drives the horror the way Bernard Herrmann’s does in Psycho. This is one of James Agee’s rare screenplays—another was The African Queen—and it captures America in the Depression as
 well as did his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans. The film’s story is an American equivalent of the Brothers Grimm."