The Seventh Victim (1943) is one of a half-dozen masterpieces by auteur producer Val Lewton produced by RKO Studios in the forties. This cycle of films is linked by their atmosphere of dread and their dark, foreboding visual style. The Seventh Victim, directed by Lewton’s film editor Mark Robson, was particularly influential. Films as diverse as Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Devil Rides Out (1968) owe more than a little to the plot and style of The Seventh Victim.
Paranoia and dread permeate every frame of The Seventh Victim. The film takes place in a city of perpetual night where long shadows obscure the secretive goings on of a covert Satanic cult. Mental illness, suicide, and existential ennui form the major themes of a film whose horrors lie in the anticipation of the unkowable and the unseen. The Seventh Victim deals in the terrors of human frailty and the flexibility of human relationships.
The Seventh Victim subverts genre expectations at every turn. The film is decidedly committed to plotting events so that, even in the denouement, they remain obscured and inexplicable. The viewer is as lost in this sea of shadows as Mary (Kim Hunter) as she looks for her missing sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks). The Seventh Victim is a film where the best detective must also be a poet; his eye trained on the ethereal realities of human interiority.
In the many decades since its release The Seventh Victim has only grown in its critical estimation. The cult following of the film has championed it and its author so that Val Lewton is as heralded as Orson Welles or John Huston for his work in film. The Seventh Victim is a masterpiece of horror that predicted the psychological crisis that would form the conceptual basis of the post-war era film. The Seventh Victim is a film so singular that it remains as vital today as it did in 1943.
