Reverend Harry Powell

Reverend Harry Powell is a fictional character in Davis Grubb's 1953 novel The Night of the Hunter. He was portrayed by Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton's 1955 film adaptation, and by Richard Chamberlain in the 1991 made for TV remake. He was voted 29th on the American Film Institute's top 50 villains of all time list.

Powell is a self declared itinerant preacher, who is also a con artist, and serial killer. He has the words "LOVE" tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and "HATE" tattooed on the other, a fact that he explains to his victims by using his hands in a sermon about the eternal struggle between good and evil. He spreads the gospel up and down the Ohio River in the late 1920s and early 1930s, gaining the trust of wealthy widows, marrying them and then killing them for their money. Driven by a fanatical hatred of women and sex, he believes that he is doing God's work, as "[God's] book is full of killin's." He roams the West Virginia and Ohio countryside along the river, leaving a trail of murdered women in his wake, until he is arrested for grand theft auto in Parkersburg and sent to the state prison in Moundsville.

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