Recently, we discussed the Manchurian Candidate. Another movie in my all-time top ten list is Night of the Hunter, in which Robert Mitchum plays a murderous preacher. The last film ever directed by actor Charles Laughton, it is an expressionist masterpiece also starring former silent movie starlet Lillian Gish.

Here, the evil preacher attempts to win over the children of the woman (Shelly Winters) he wants to marry, kill, and rob. It is one of the greatest filmic depictions of pure good versus pure evil—constantly on top 100 all-time film lists—yet it was a critical and commercial failure when it was originally released:

His Love/Hate fingers have often been ripped off or paid homage to (depending on how you see it), for example in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing:

One of the most haunting images in the incredibly shot Night of the Hunter was the image of Winters’ corpse underwater:

So go see it: you can’t go wrong with evil preacher movies.