Chain
From the riverbank to the desert, a journey through American cinema's darkest portraits of faith, charisma, and the corruption that follows.
American cinema has always been fascinated by the collision of faith and power, that dangerous place where a charismatic voice can bend a congregation to its will. This chain traces that obsession from the shadowy riverbanks of the Depression-era South to the sun-scorched plains of the modern West, following the ways filmmakers have used their own historical moments to sharpen the blade of their stories. Each film here is a study in how belief can curdle into control, and how the very qualities that make a leader magnetic can also make them monstrous.
We begin with Charles Laughton's 1955 masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, a film that feels like a fever dream of American Gothic. Robert Mitchum's Preacher Harry Powell, with his knuckle tattoos and honeyed voice, is the archetype of the false prophet, a man who uses scripture as a weapon and children as his prey. Laughton, a British director making his only American film, tapped into a postwar anxiety about the seductive power of demagoguery, creating a fairy tale that is both timeless and deeply rooted in its era's fears of the charismatic con man.
From there, the chain moves forward through the decades, each film a response to its own cultural moment. The 1970s give us a paranoid thriller about a messianic killer, the 1990s a portrait of a cult leader who is both victim and victimizer, and the 2000s a brutal epic of oil and religion that sees capitalism as its own kind of faith. The journey culminates in the 2010s with a film that drags the battle between fundamentalism and secularism into the present day, reminding us that the tension between charisma and corruption is not a relic of the past but a living, breathing force in American life.
What emerges is a through-line of suspicion: a deep-seated American distrust of the man who claims to speak for God, and a fascination with the way that claim can be twisted into a tool of domination. These films are not just about religion; they are about the human hunger for meaning and the ease with which that hunger can be exploited. As you watch them in sequence, you will see the same story told again and again, in different keys, each one a variation on a theme that never grows old.
Charles Laughton's only directorial effort is a Southern Gothic fairy tale in which a murderous preacher, played with terrifying charm by Robert Mitchum, hunts two children who know where their father's stolen money is hidden.
The Night of the Hunter → Marathon Man
The Link
Where The Night of the Hunter showed a preacher's charisma as a mask for evil, Marathon Man updates that menace for the 1970s: Olivier's Dr. Szell is a monster without any religious veneer, yet he commands a cult-like loyalty among his followers, and the film's brutal dentistry scene carries the same sadistic charge as Mitchum's preaching.
John Schlesinger's paranoid thriller pits a graduate student (Dustin Hoffman) against a Nazi war criminal (Laurence Olivier) hiding in plain sight in New York, where the past refuses to stay buried.
Marathon Man → There Will Be Blood
The Link
The battle between Plainview and Eli Sunday is the clearest statement of the chain's theme: two forms of charisma, one secular and one sacred, each corrupt in its own way. Anderson's film, like Marathon Man, is a study in the psychology of power, but it pushes the tension to a biblical scale, echoing the riverbank showdowns of The Night of the Hunter with a modern, capitalist twist.
Paul Thomas Anderson's epic of oil and religion in early 20th-century California stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a prospector whose ruthless pursuit of wealth brings him into conflict with a young preacher, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano).
There Will Be Blood → Red State
The Link
Red State drags the theme into the 21st century, imagining what happens when the charismatic preacher of The Night of the Hunter and the corrupt oilman of There Will Be Blood merge into a single figure: Abin Cooper, who wields both spiritual and temporal power. Smith's film is a direct response to the culture wars of the 2000s, showing how religious extremism can become a violent, armed force.
Kevin Smith's horror thriller follows a group of teenagers who stumble into the compound of the Five Points Trinity Church, a fundamentalist sect led by the fire-and-brimstone preacher Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), and find themselves fighting for their lives.
Red State → The Master
The Link
If Red State is the nightmare of religious extremism, The Master is its seduction. Lancaster Dodd is a man of words, not violence, but his charisma is just as corrupting. Anderson, returning to the theme after There Will Be Blood, explores the psychological mechanisms of cult membership, showing how a lost soul like Freddie can find meaning in a man's confident lies.
Paul Thomas Anderson's post-war drama follows Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a troubled drifter who falls under the spell of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the charismatic leader of a philosophical movement known as 'The Cause.'
The Master → The Sacrament
The Link
The Sacrament takes the cult dynamic of The Master and pushes it to its logical, horrifying conclusion. Where Lancaster Dodd's movement is a psychological trap, Father's Eden Parish is a physical one, and West's film uses the documentary format to make the viewer complicit in the slow revelation of its corruption, echoing the journalistic gaze of Marathon Man.
Ti West's found-footage horror follows a journalist and his cameraman as they travel to a remote commune in the jungle, only to discover that its leader, Father (Gene Jones), is a charismatic figure with a dark secret, inspired by the Jonestown massacre.
The Sacrament → First Reformed
The Link
First Reformed inverts the chain's pattern: here, the corruption begins within the man of God himself, not in a cult leader. Reverend Toller is a true believer whose devotion to his faith and to the planet becomes a form of extremism, and Schrader's film, like The Sacrament, shows how the line between righteous conviction and destructive fanaticism can blur, especieally in an era of ecological anxiety.
Paul Schrader's austere drama stars Ethan Hawke as a small-town pastor whose crisis of faith is compounded by the radical environmental activism of a young parishioner, leading him down a path of extremism that mirrors the very forces he opposes.
First Reformed → The Eyes of Tammy Faye
The Link
The Eyes of Tammy Faye brings the chain full circle, from the fictional preachers of The Night of the Hunter to the real ones of the televangelist era. It is a story of charisma and corruption played out on a national stage, where faith becomes a commodity and the congregation becomes a market. The film's sympathetic portrayal of Tammy Faye complicates the theme, asking whether the corrupt can also be victims, and whether the hunger for belief can ever be separated from the hunger for power.
Michael Showalter's biopic tells the story of Tammy Faye Bakker and her husband Jim, televangelists who built a religious empire in the 1980s, only to see it collapse amid scandal and fraud.
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