Otto Hunte qualified with a degree from the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg. He first came to notice as a stage designer in Berlin around the turn of the century. When he entered films in 1919 as a set decorator and costume designer, he joined a highly skilled team (usually working in tandem with top craftsmen like Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht), frequently for the director Fritz Lang. As production designer/art director, Hunte was especially renowned for the darkly sinister, gothic sets he created for Lang's mammoth "Nibelungen" saga. In perfect contrast to these were his stylised futuristic designs for the underground Metropolis (1927); the monumental and richly ornate architecture for the sacrificial temple of Eschnapur in the two-part epic "Das Indische Grabmal" (and, similarly, for the city of Ophir in the fifth instalment of "Die Herrin der Welt").

With the advent of sound, Hunte's work adapted to more contemporary requirements, such as the seedy night club setting for The Blue Angel (1930). An atomic reactor designed for the film Gold (1934) was apparently so convincing, that the Allies confiscated all prints of the film after the war. During the mid-1930's, Hunte sadly blotted his copy book by working on several notorious Nazi propaganda films. Ironically, his penultimate contribution was the anti-Nazi drama Murderers Among Us (1946). This, the first so-called 'Trümmer-film', was an immensely effective evocation of devastated post-war Germany.