scores, it holds up... well after four decades." Dave Kehr wrote that "Charles Laughton's first and only film as a director is an enduring masterpiece—dark, deep, beautiful, aglow... The source of its style and power is mysterious—it is a film without precedent and without any real equals." The Night of the Hunter was rated No. 90 on Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments. In a 2007 listing of the 100 Most Beautiful Films, Cahiers du cinéma ranked The Night of the Hunter No. 2. It is among the top ten in the BFI list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14. In 2008, it was ranked as the 71st greatest movie of all time by Empire magazine in its issue of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time. In 2012, Sight and Sound magazine's decennial "Greatest Films of All Time" poll ranked it as the 63rd greatest film ever made; in 2022, the same poll put it at No. 25. In 1992, the United States Library of Congress deemed The Night of the Hunter to be "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and selected the film for preservation in its National Film Registry. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 93% based on , with a weighted average rating of 9.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Featuring Robert Mitchum's formidable performance as a child-hunting preacher, The Night of the Hunter is a disturbing look at good and evil." American Film Institute recognition AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills – No. 34 AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains – Reverend Harry Powell - Villain No. 29 Mark Callaghan, the lead singer for the Australian band The Riptides, parodied Mitchum's character in the music video for the 1982 track, Hearts And Flowers. Reverend Harry Powell's speech about love and hate has become a memorable moment in film history. In the 1989 Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing, the character Radio Raheem wears brass knuckles saying "love" and "hate" on each hand and gives a speech that is an almost verbatim copy of Powell's. The Coen brothers have referenced The Night of the Hunter in several of their own films, including The Big Lebowski (the line "the Dude abides," which is an echo of Rachel's closing line "They abide, and they endure") and True Grit (the visual style of Rooster's night ride with Mattie, which is similar to