La Septième Victime

Schoolgirl Kim Hunter (Mary) is called to the office of the Headmistress Ottola Nesmith and told that she can no longer stay on as a pupil as her sister Jean Brooks (Jacqueline) has stopped paying her fees. More than that, Brooks seems to have gone missing. So, Hunter goes off to find her. But Brooks isn't so easy to locate.

This film leaves you with scenes stuck in your mind, so it's good from that perspective. It is also well shot with an eerie atmosphere. Scenes that stand out include the sequence with Hunter and a detective exploring an office at night and the subsequent spooky train ride, a shower scene that will make you think of "Psycho" (1960) and pretty much every scene with Brooks. Fancy a drink? – no thanks but the pressure is on. And how about that ending? Wow, pretty bleak stuff. Especially coming after what had me cringing as we watched God and the Bible being used as a tool to counter Satan and his ways in an extremely simplistic way.

Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant – remember your Latin from school? The 'ablative absolute' and the 'ut' clause (use the subjunctive). Quamquam. This film also throws in some Latin and I'm glad to hear it. It takes the viewer back to a time sadly long gone as we hear schoolgirls reciting the verb 'Amo' – to love. The day will come when a generation will watch this film and not understand what language it is.

The cast are OK with Jean Brooks standing out. Her look suggests she is leader of the occult movement rather than a victim of it. And all of her scenes are quality – some genuinely scary, and all unworldly because of her appearance. That ending with the neighbour comes as a shock and leaves an eerie memory that will have you thinking about how we view life. It's an interesting film…and sad.

As a longtime booster of The Cat People, I tended to give the credit to its director Jacques Tourneur (later to helm Out of the Past). Seeing The Seventh Victim, also from Val Lewton's B-movie unit at RKO, changed all that. It seems Lewton was the resident genius, cobbling together stylish horror/suspense films on shoestring budgets. The young Kim Hunter, away at a private school, learns that her tuition hasn't been paid because her sister, owner of a beauty empire, has disappeared. She leaves school and starts scouring New York's Greenwich Village (also the locale of much of The Cat People) only to uncover a cult of devil worshipers. Lewton's thrillers haven't dated the way James Whale's, for instance, have, possibly because they depend so heavily on suggestion; the literalness of today's "horror" films is completely alien to these suggestive, truly chilling films. The RKO B-movie unit under Lewton was also, probably, a major influence on the look of film noir, soon to become the cutting-edge aesthetic in American movies. This is as tense and satisfying a 75 minutes as you'll find until the Mann/Alton team's seminal noirs of a few years later.

No surprise that Val Lewton was involved with The Seventh Victim, his fingerprints can be seen on every frame. Like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie, the atmosphere oozes from the screen, although Tournier was not involved here. Young Kim Hunter tries to find her sister, only to find she has fallen into the clutches of a group of Satanists. Oddly, the Satanists are presented as a gentile bunch, no raving lunatics here, they all seem disturbingly sane. There are some magnificent images here. Hunter breaking into her sisters room to find nothing but a chair and a noose, a creepy shower scene that pre-dates Psycho and the extraordinary downbeat ending. A grim little chiller that remains unsettlingly plausible throughout.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM is one of the best films produced by Val Lewton, famous for his wartime series of low budgeted, but brillantly spooky thrillers. A young girl (Kim Hunter) tries to locate her missing sister in Manhattan. In doing so, she uncovers a witch coven. There are so many masterful moments in this classic. In one scene, she is stalked by top-hatted cultists in a deserted subway, in another scene, as she showers, a female cultist confronts her (Shades of PSYCHO?) and there are terrific shocks as an exiled cultist tries to escape the coven. A must for horror fans!

I'm not sure if this is the film that officially caused RKO to rein in their errant art-horror guru--and stick him with Boris Karloff to make sure they got actual horror, just like Universal--but, more than most Lewton films that started out as a completely different story, this one's probably his most muddled. The story feels like it spends so much time trying to be an "allegory" for something, it's hard to nail down what it actually is.

Supposedly, we follow virginal girls'-school student Kim Hunter, as she has to go to New York to track down her missing sister who disappeared into the Greenwich Village life, and later discovers her sister has been marked for death by a sinister occult organization among the city elite, and you can never tell who might be In On It--Call it "Rosemary's Sister". There's an intriguing beginning with a private detective, two helpful male romantic-leads, and the usual Cat People-esque Val Lewton nervous street chases, but once we meet the sister, the story keeps trying to lecture us on something else.

We learn that the sister was starting to feel unfulfilled and suicidal, but once the Sinister Organization catches up with her, to "sacrifice" her into silence, their method is to sit her at a table and browbeat her into trying to drink a glass of poison--after all, she wanted to kill herself, didn't she?--like Eyes Wide Shut re-enacting the Death of Socrates. And although we're told who the Sinister Occult Organization is, we never actually see them doing anything sinister or occult: With a few rewrites, the baddies could just as easily have been secret Nazi saboteurs, and, in DeWitt Bodeen's earlier murder-mystery draft of the story, probably were.

The movie ends with our two heroes catching up with the baddies and self-righteously lecturing them, for reasons that seem to go a lot deeper than just being Sinister or Occult.

Unlike the usual tight Lewton button-pushing (there's a neat chill that foreshadows Hitchcock's shower scene, seventeen years early), there's so much Message, Metaphor and Allegory muddling the thriller, it feels like a screenwriter wanted to get something off his chest. It's the kind of story that a screenwriter would write after going through his own personal issues, and forget to not make them so personal for the studio. I give it 6/10 for being so ponderous, as many films from 1943 were.