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While I can't answer for "kids" (cr-e-e-a-k), I can offer a minute Barry of critical perspective.
If in retrospect
Night of the Hunter seems a rare black pearl, it might be due to the work of veterans in special hats: Actor Charles Laughton directed, and Pulitzer-festooned James Agee scripted. The style is unusually literary, the characterization, eccentric and dark for the time.
By modern standards, many of
Hunter's transitions seem unnecessary, the dialogue, superfluous and overly cheery. This is due, I think, to multimedia conditioning. Our branded gothic/horror films now have generic titles like "Darkness" and proceed with spare dialogue, pseudo-surprising voice-overs, mannered mood and obvious homage. The idea of modern box office is to expect the film to do the audience's work and leave nothing to interpretation; older films often foregrounded ambiguity and subtext. Just the other day, I watched
Shadow of a Doubt with friends and found they had no stomach for the coyness of Hitchcock or the suburban tangents of (screenwriter) Thornton Wilder. My friends didn't enjoy Hitchcock's slow subversion of the ordinary, nor did they find worthwhile subtext in the well-adjusted dinner table patter. All they wanted was to focus on Joseph Cotton's psychopath and his occasional grim pronouncements. I disagree, of course, but I appreciate their point of view.
Just so, the sunnier parts of
Hunter might leave some viewers craving more carnage. Many of us might find Shelley Winters's lake mannequin body double annoying rather than amusing or scary, and Mitchum's character might seem more Dean Martin than Dean Corll. (Addicts of the conventions of the present will conclude the film is obvious and overdone even as they ignore worse excesses in any Tim Burton flick.)
Even so,
Hunter is a masterpiece of its kind.
The Bad Seed is something else entirely: a film that is entertaining for reasons that are sometimes unintentional. It is a cross between "The Small Assassin" and
Baby Doll.
