Spike Lee names his favourite horror movie of all time
American filmmaker Spike Lee rose to prominence in the 1980s, becoming one of the decade’s leading directors. Starting with She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, Lee quickly established himself as an essential voice, with 1989’s Do The Right Thing landing an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
Lee’s work typically explores race, gender and politics with great nuance, compelled by real-world issues and personal experiences. One of his most acclaimed films remains Malcolm X, his biopic of the famous activist, chronicling his life, including his imprisonment, Mecca pilgrimage and eventual death.
While his ’80s movies were primarily comedy dramas, as his career progressed, Lee moved into other genres, such as crime thrillers, war, and even horror. However, no matter the genre, the filmmaker has primarily used the cinematic medium as a way to highlight important social and cultural issues.
Lee used the horror genre to explore social themes, such as race, religion and class, in 2014’s Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. After all, horror is perhaps the most socially conscious genre, with crazed killers and supernatural beings often providing the perfect metaphors to explore social commentary. While horror movies started as a way to elicit fear and entertainment in audiences, as the genre progressed, scary movies soon came to tackle themes such as patriarchy, fascism, racism and animal cruelty.
For Lee, there’s one horror movie that he frequently returns to, citing it as a significant source of inspiration: The Night of the Hunter. Directed by Charles Laughton, the 1955 movie initially received negative reviews, subsequently becoming the English actor’s only directorial credit. The movie was inspired by the real case of Harry Powers and follows a killer who cleverly masks himself as a preacher. In order to find some hidden money, he hunts down a woman and her two children.
The Night of the Hunter is an incredible film, and it’s a true shame that Laughton was never able to direct anything else, dying in 1962 before he could see his creation become a well-respected cult classic. Complete with shadowy black-and-white photography, which creates a haunting, otherwordly feel, the movie blends true terror with an undercurrent of dark humour.
Lee loves the film so much that he paid tribute to it in Do The Right Thing. In the scene where Radio Raheem shows off his memorable ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ brass knuckles before delivering a speech on good and evil, Lee is directly referencing Harry’s hand tattoos and monologue in The Night of the Hunter.
The director discussed the film’s “great speech about love and hate” with the American Film Institute, stating, “Robert Mitchum has love and hate tattooed on his fingers, and at the time, in the hip-hop world, they had these name rings. So I said, ‘Let’s put love and hate on each one of these rings.’ And I just borrowed the speech from the movie.”
