Great Film overall

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

A dark thriller from the popular '40s pairing of director Mark Robson and producer Val Lewton. This relies heavily on atmosphere to unsettle the viewer instead of any visual effects; in fact, there are no special effects at all in this film. There are no monsters, ghouls, ghosts, or spirits. In fact, only two people get killed in the entire thing. Therefore this film might be inaccessible to the latest crazed horror fiend who has been brought up on blood, guts, and more blood. Personally, I found this to be a creepy little low-key thriller.While the Satanic plot may be nothing new, in some ways this film is very different indeed. For instance, the Satanists are depicted as a genteel, tea-drinking group who hate violence, not the typical robed maniacs with huge sacrificial knives. Therefore, the baddies in this film are more chillingly realistic than you might imagine, they could be your fellow workers or neighbours. This was one element of the film I liked. The acting is all above average with the cast giving subtle performances, from a youngish Tom Conway who fits the role of a stern British doctor to a tee through to Isabel Jewell as the surprisingly likable female lead, who gets to be tough and assertive in some scenes, which makes a usual change from the usual role the girl was relegated to in this period - a screaming victim.It's also a plus to have Val Lewton on board, who once again includes much of his own unique visual style. Shadows are used heavily (the very best is made of the black and white) to suggest menace, and it works, making the viewer feeling disquiet and nervous, instead of having in-your-face shock horror, the sort with which we bombarded these days. The strong visual imagery - the horror of the swinging noose - plus the oodles of atmosphere help to lift the plodding plot, which has to be said doesn't really go anywhere. And check out the ending - surprisingly downbeat for the time. THE SEVENTH VICTIM may be difficult to watch for some because it has dated somewhat today, but nonetheless the use of visual artistry is highly effective.

You're in store for satanic misery when you see this awful 1943 film.Kim Hunter spends the entire film looking for her missing sister. The latter is often seen with a Cleopatra like-hair-do and is constantly seeking out death.While searching, Kim meets up with the people around the sister's orbit. Seems as though she has joined a Satanic cult and as they claim she has betrayed them, she must die!Only Isabell Jewell has her moments as one of the members of this sick group. Jewell can burst forth crying, but this is not like her condemned seamstress 8 years earlier in the magnificent "Tale of Two Cities."Along the way, Hunter finds love with a guy she later discovers is married to the cookie sister. How convenient the sister makes it for them at film's end. Let us say a merciful end.

For a few years in the early 1940s a small, B-feature producer achieved something very unusual within the Hollywood industrial system: a series of personalised films featuring a repertory company of performers, directors, writers and technicians. The producer, a Russian émigré who anglicised his name to Val Lewton, had been kicking around Hollywood for years, initially as a writer and then as a gofer for David Selznick, before RKO gave him an opportunity to produce B movies. These had to be completed in six weeks, produced in the studio lot using existing sets and on a shoestring budget. The first, Cat People, was an enormous success. Thereafter, he was saddled with increasingly crass titles (I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, Curse of the Cat People) which belied the haunting and melancholic quality of the films themselves. Despite the restrictions, Lewton proved a shrewd operator. Using inexperienced directors with ambition (Mark Robson directed The Seventh Victim and others who owed long future careers to Lewton included Robert Wise and Jacques Tourneur), Lewton was able to create an ensemble of considerable talent, over which he presided with a unifying sensibility unlike that of any other producer, with the possible exception of his former boss, David Selznick. The Seventh Victim was the first of the series not to attract a lurid title and, possibly in consequence, did less well than others. The film defies genre: neither thriller nor horror film but with elements of both, the plot is a quest. Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is told by the head teacher of her boarding school that she will have to leave because her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) has stopped paying the fees and disappeared. Mary travels to New York where she makes chilling discoveries about her sister's life. Along the way, Lewton's script provides his trademark moments of shock and black humour (an elegant one-armed woman is asked to play the piano and deal cards) and provides ample evidence of the influence Lewton's work had on his friend, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roman Polanski. At 78 minutes the film is a model of spare story-telling though, inevitably, the strictures of budget, time (filming took only 24 days) and studio control had some impact on performances. These are mitigated by the availability of RKO's house team of designers, director of photography, Nicholas Musuraca and composer, Roy Webb, which lends it a visual and aural richness well beyond its means. The Seventh Victim's uniqueness, however, is that, like the John Donne sonnet with which it opens and closes, it is a meditation on death, quite unlike anything else of its time and place, personified by the beautiful and haunted face of Jean Brooks as she walks the rainy streets of a studio-bound Manhattan. Lewton went on to produce seven more films at RKO in the next three years before a making a series of disastrous career choices that limited his output to only two further films before his death of a heart attack at the age of 46 in 1951. Footnote: Intrigued by his lack of further credits, I recently looked up the career details of one of the actors in The Seventh Victim, Erford Gage, only to discover that he was killed in action on Iwo Jima in 1945, some 18 months after The Seventh Victim was released.

Remember when satanic cults were full of straight-laced middle-aged men and women sitting around in parlors wearing ties and wide brimmed hats? No I don't either, but according to this film that was the modus operandi of a group called The Palladists in Greenwich Village. We've probably never heard about them because they have stricter rules than The Fight Club, if a member talks about the Palladists outside the group their days are numbered. This creepy horror noir is enjoyable and worth a watch. If nothing else to see Hugh Beaumont show off his acting chops before he was typecast as Beaver Cleaver's father Ward. As it turns out, The Palladists was the alleged name of a secret society in France in the 19th century, so this film could claim it was "based on a true story" if it wanted to. When one of the members asks for proof that good is better than evil, I for one wasn't convinced by the protagonist's response.