Hacker Cinema
The Night of the Hunter
1955 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Charles Laughton
In Depression-era West Virginia, a serial-killing preacher hunts two young children who know the whereabouts of a stash of money.
3 positive3 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
GPT-4o already one-shots Leetcode hard with just a screenshot. I know, it's trained on the answers. But it clicked in my head that if you give the LLM a very detailed specification + tests to the level of detail that Leetcode does, you might actually be able to one-shot any code you like.
Over the weekend, I made a game. It's heavily dialogue based. I wanted a screen and game content that centers around this gameplay. It's not a classic VN, more customized like Ace Attorney.
It's a free game so I need an intro that hooks people in the first 30 seconds. What examples are good for this? Since there's few games like this, I look into movies. I don't want that scene from Inglourious Basterds, that's too fresh. There's a lot of good stuff in classic film, before the 80s that nobody has seen. These movies had to carry themselves on content because they didn't have special effects.
And that's where DeepResearch comes in.
I'm looking for specific films that fit the tutorial of the game that I'm trying to build. Without going into details, there's 4 mechanics I want to squeeze into the tutorial level. I'm looking for specific scenes that capture these mechanics.
One intent is "How do I get players to not skip dialogue like they would with a VN?" AI's interpretation of this is "scripts that encourage impatience". I didn't even know what question to ask, and it helped to rephrase my intent into the right questions then find examples of those.
It wrote a 6000 word essay, plenty of citations, some with clips. I don't have to spend a couple nights watching Psycho or The Night of the Hunter. I can just jump straight to the clips I want. I can skim 24 different movies in the same two nights.
One of my favorite movies is ‘Night of the Hunter’. It was critically crucified to the point where the director (Charles Laughton) never directed another movie. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that this was a loss to humanity and culture. Of course now, all critics are desperate to broadcast its brilliance.
I came here to note that, an utterly charming film, with the terrific classical actor Laughton following it with his sole movie as director, the haunting, beautiful and unique Night of the Hunter which I'm sure must also have some fans here.
Another way to think about it: The night scenes in old movies could embrace the stylization and limitations that the combination of relatively insensitive film and studio lighting afforded. See for example, the night scenes in The Night of the Hunter, for example the riverboat scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFzTBPy7nl8. (The youtube video is stunningly low-bandwidth, another level of remove, but, yet again, the movie still holds up.)
> which usually, with most photos, is to losslessly convey the experience of looking at the subject of the photo, as it looked at the place and time the photo was taken.
That’s quite a strong statement, and one that I think many photographers would disagree with.
Snapshots aside, this severely understates the artistic choices a photographer makes. For one thing, black & white and color read very differently to the eye, and offer different palettes for composition (although it’s not about photography, Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” has a great exploration of the effects of b&w vs color and is a fun read to boot). Basically all b&w cinematography also gives the lie to this statement: it’s impossible to honestly argue that a colorization of, say, the stark expressionism of Night of the Hunter would be a repaired version.
The extent to which a photo is, or is even intended to be, a representation of “primary-source ground truth” is something we’ve been arguing since, like, Edward Said. I’m not saying images should never be colorized, or upscaled, or whatever. Obviously that’s not the case. Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary, as another poster mentioned, is a triumph. But it’s too complicated a conversation to dismiss by declaring, in one sentence like Moses coming down from the mountain, that the purpose of photography is the “lossless communication of information”.