It was the great metaphor of the world “seen by a child” that allowed Laughton to introduce Brechtian elements into the scenography. Like the main character and several secondary characters, the world of the film – which denounces itself as an illusion – is Brechtian in a political way. The films exposes a world founded on false values, in which Preacher incarnates the eternal alliance between American fascism and puritan hysteria, known at that time as McCarthyism. Watching The Night of the Hunter today, in light of the documentary (and preferably in Bob Gitt’s restored version), allows for the rediscovery of a film in which the editing, controlled entirely by the director, was absolutely not intended to produce naturalistic or psychological effects. Norman Mailer, who sold the rights to his novel The Naked and the Dead (later made by Raoul Walsh) to Laughton’s producer Paul Gregory, stated upon leaving a screening of The Night of the Hunter, that Laughton “did not understand editing and was incapable of making use of it”. Instead, through the actors, Laughton’s work produces signifying gestures which the editing links in a continuity that is intended to be read. All the misunderstandings that surround this experimental film (which “truly experiments”, as Truffaut said) still today, stem from this.

Bill Krohn, in “Cahiers du cinéma”, n. 578, 2003