Anti-Climacus

LINK: You may have heard of this week's Normblog profile (not me). Question for Helen, though: I happened to catch The Night of the Hunter on TV a few weeks ago (the wonders of cable!), and, uh... really? Favorite movie ever? Robert Mitchum is legitimately creepy, and certainly terrifying in his way (and quite possibly makes the movie on his own), but the undercurrent of sadism, well. Perhaps it's best to say that there's a line Hitchcock comes up to many times in his film career, and part of the tension in his movies is how close he gets to the line without going over (I haven't seen the ones where he crosses the line, as I recall), but this seems to step over the line and not really even have noticed the line in the first place. The talking heads before this movie commented that Charles Laughton was disappointed with how poorly the movie did at the box office, and so never made another. I might have to side with the viewing public on this one.