The Seventh Victim (1943)

1943 was a very good year for horror, with three true classics issuing from the Val Lewton B-Horror unit at RKO. Of the three, my favourite is The Seventh Victim, directed by former editor Marc Robson after his banishment to the B basement for having worked closely with Orson Welles' on the cutting of The Magnificent Ambersons. As in the previous year's Cat People, the setting is contemporary, dealing with a naive young Kim Hunter's search for her missing older sister (played by a haunted looking Jean Brooks), who has become involved with a Manhattan devil cult. This time out the supernatural is entirely absent, the Satanic cult in question comprised entirely of jaded urban sophisticates in search of tawdry thrills, and it is from them alone that the film's threat emanates: no demons ever appear. Breaking ranks with this pathetic group carries with it a sentence of death, and big sister has made the decision to leave. 

Existential despair hangs over every scene. It's clear that Brooks -- like the other members -- joined the cult in a desperate attempt to bring some spark to her empty existence, only to find it and the people involved every bit as pathetic as her daily grind: more so, in fact. Another woman living in her building has just been given a death sentence herself (her's is medical), and makes the hopeless decision to go out into the nightlife of the city, dance, drink, and take any lover she can find while there is life left to spend. Tom Conway reprises his role as psychiatrist Dr. Judd from Cat People, and anyone who recognises the character knows that, even if he is necessarily safe from harm for the duration of what is obviously intended to be a prequel to the earlier film, he too is already dead in the future (where he will be murdered by Simone Simon). Of course, as the economist Maynard Keynes once quipped, in the long run, we're all dead -- even pretty young Kim Hunter, who gets her first taste of a cold and uncertain world when her school tuition simply stops coming, the first clue that something has gone wrong with the sister who raised her after the untimely death of their parents.

When you get right down to it, The Seventh Victim is more crime noir than horror movie, but it really isn't that, either. More than anything else it is perhaps the best indication we have that Val Lewton may not have been entirely kidding when he told a horrified exhibitor that the main message of his pictures was, "Death is good." But don't let all this doom and gloom put you off: it's also very entertaining, and my pick for the best fantastic film of '43.