Recently re-released in a restored print, The Night of the Hunter is today regarded as an enduring screen achievement. A tale of terror told from a child's point of view, it was the only film directed by the late actor Charles Laughton. Ignored at the box office when it was first released in 1955, a decade ago it joined the select ranks of pictures chosen for inclusion in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, and in 2000 it made the cut of the American Film Institute's "100 Greatest Thrillers." As the late Pauline Kael pointed out in writing of Hunter, "...truly frightening movies have a way of becoming classics of a kind." But, like the novel on which it is based, Hunter strives for more than the jolts and shudders to which most suspense movies limit themselves. It is Mother Goose with goosebumps, aiming at the heart as well as the gut, with a tenderness and compassion almost unheard of in the hrror film genre. As haunting as the hand of HATE and the threat of the knife are the faces of the children and the music of a lullaby. In Heaven and Hell to Play With, Preston Neal Jones tells us how this unique film came to be, from its beginnings in the pages of Davis Grubb's novel to the acquisition of film rights by producer Paul Gregory, the hiring of Laughton to direct and James Agee to write the script, to every aspect of the film's development and production -- casting, design, shooting, scoring and editing -- to the profound disappointment upon its release. The book's narrative derives from archival research and, dramatically, from interviews with a dozen key people associated with the film, including Davis Grubb, Gregory, actors Robert Mitchum and Lillian Gish and cinematographer Stanley Cortz. These oral histories, like pieces of a mosaic, have been deftly assembled by Preston Neal Jones into an account that is as compelling as the movie it celebrates.