The True Monster

As we were watching The Night of the Hunter (1955), one of the questions we were supposed to keep in the back of our heads asked if Harry is all of the horror. While he is the charming villain, I would argue that Harry is a very small part of the overall horror in the film. What Harry represents, the far-reaching tendrils of the (religious) patriarchy, is much more terrifying. He works to silence those that oppose him and he uses bible quotes (I’m not as familiar with the bible as my parents would like me to be) or at least religious language to push his agenda. 

On Willa’s and Harry’s wedding night, Harry is unable to make love to Willa as a way to physically represent the fact that he didn’t marry her out of love. He tells her that her body is meant for “begetting children, not for the lust of men” (never mind her own pleasure). He wants Willa to be clean— pure. This represents the idea that women can only exist in two forms, the virgin and the whore. To have sex for her own pleasure would be unclean in Harry’s eyes and he uses this to shame Willa. In this scene, Harry’s manipulation of Willa is disturbing, but a woman’s inability to be sexually autonomous is so much more frightening to me. While it’s not really shown in the film, the virgin-whore dichotomy is incredibly damaging to women at the societal and individual levels. For the people that buy into the idea, they believe that to be lady-like, to be pure, and to have value is to only have sex within the sanctity of marriage and in extreme cases— like between Harry and Willa— sex should only happen if the purpose is to have children. This leads to shaming women for stepping out of these boundaries for the smallest things. It should also be noted that in this scene, Willa does not seem all that put off by a man, in his position, having these views. After he does express these views and she goes along with them, she loses all of her power in the relationship.
Now, this may be a bit of a stretch, but there seems to be something going on with hiding the money in Pearl’s doll. When the father hides the money, he says that he is going to put it in the last place they police (or anyone else) would look. He places value in the doll— a girl’s toy that happens to be a toy girl. This could be to say that women and girls are so undervalued that no one would even expect them to have value. Even as the father hides the money there, he only tells John where it is, telling John that he “got common sense— [your mother] ain’t”. I think we can assume Pearl would not have been in on it, if it had not been her doll. I noted at least one time, when Harry meets John and Pearl, that Harry holds the doll and the money in his hands. It would never occur to him that something relating to women and girls could hold so much value.
Overall throughout the film, Harry uses the lord’s name and religious language to justify a lot of questionable actions on his part, especially when trying to get the money from the children. Harry even has the gall to sit outside Ms. Cooper’s home singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” while he tries to intimidate her into handing over the children. With his booming voice, he seems so cocksure of himself and his power as a man, that he’s not even worried about this old lady with a gun. 

The conclusion of The Night of the Hunter (1955) is extremely satisfying, but more importantly realistic. Harry is defeated and the children seem pretty convinced that Harry and everything he represents is bad, but there’s still Ruby. Ruby is there to show the audience that the issue isn’t as black and white as we would like it to be. Ruby’s desire for love and belonging are the reason why she would buy into patriarchal views and why she would compromise herself to have someone around to make her feel loved. Instead of shaming Ruby for falling prey to Harry so easily, Ms. Cooper does her best to understand Ruby and give her love and belonging so that hopefully she won’t feel the need to seek those in toxic people.