The Seventh Victim is a 1943 American horror film directed by Mark Robson and starring Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, Isabel Jewell, and Kim Hunter in her film debut. Written by Charles O'Neal and DeWitt Bodeen, and produced by Val Lewton for RKO Radio Pictures, the film focuses on a young woman who stumbles on an underground cult of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village, New York City, while searching for her missing sister. It marks Robson's directorial debut.
O'Neal had written the script as a murder mystery, set in California, that followed a woman hunted by a serial killer. Bodeen revised the script, basing the story on a Satanic society meeting he attended in New York City and setting it as a prequel to Cat People (1942), with Conway reprising his role as Dr. Louis Judd. Filming took place over 24 days in May 1943 at RKO Studios in Los Angeles.
Released on August 21, 1943, the film failed to garner significant income at the box office and received mixed reviews from critics, who found its narrative incoherence a primary fault. It was later revealed that Robson and editor John Lockert had removed four substantial scenes from the final cut, including an extended conclusion. In spite of its mixed reception, it became a cult film in England, noted by critics for its homoerotic undertones.
Plot
Mary Gibson, a young woman at Highcliffe Academy, a boarding school, is informed by the principal that her older sister and only relative, Jacqueline, has gone missing and has not paid Mary's tuition in months. Mary decides to leave the school to find her sister, who owns La Sagesse, a cosmetics company in New York City.
Upon arriving in New York, Mary meets Esther Redi at the cosmetics company, who had been Jacqueline's assistant, and she tells Mary that Jacqueline sold the business to her eight months earlier. Jacqueline's close friend and La Sagesse employee, Frances Fallon, claims to have seen Jacqueline the week before at Dante, an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. Mary soon discovers that Jacqueline has rented a room above Dante, without having moved in. Mary persuades the owners to let her see the room, which she finds empty aside from a wooden chair and a noose hanging from the ceiling. While at Dante, Mary meets Jason Hoag, a frustrated poet, who offers to help find her sister.
Mary's investigation leads her to several individuals who knew Jacqueline, including her secret husband, attorney Gregory Ward, and a psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd. Mary learns Jacqueline had been a patient of Judd's, seeking treatment for depression stemming from her membership in a Satanic cult called the Palladists, and her subsequent efforts to leave the group. Jacqueline was lured into joining the cult by her former co-workers at La Sagesse, particularly Esther.
Mary enlists private detective Irving August to help locate Jacqueline. When Mary and Irving break into La Sagesse after hours, Irving is stabbed to death by an unseen assailant. Mary flees into the subway, where she witnesses two men board her car, carrying Irving's corpse between them. She attempts to alert the police, but the men vanish with Irving's body before they arrive.
Judd offers to bring Mary to visit Jacqueline at his residence, where she has been in hiding. There, Mary is briefly met by Jacqueline, who gestures her to be quiet before again vanishing. Determined to remain in New York, Mary takes a job at a kindergarten. Some time later, Esther breaks into Mary's apartment and confronts her in the shower, claiming that Jacqueline murdered Irving and urging Mary to return to Highcliffe. Mary tells Gregory and Jason what Esther told her and they resolve to locate Jacqueline. They unite with Judd, who takes them to meet Jacqueline.
Jacqueline recounts how she came to join the Palladists, as well as how they had sequestered her at La Sagesse for months and how she inadvertently killed Irving, believing him to be an assassin sent by the cult to kill her. (The Palladists have a rule that any member who betrays the cult must die, and they believe Jacqueline betrayed them by discussing the cult with Judd, an outsider.)
The cult members congregate to decide Jacqueline's fate. She would be the seventh person condemned for betrayal since the founding of the cult. Believing that murder is permissible only as a last resort, the Paladists prefer to goad perceived offenders into committing suicide. Frances, because of her attachment to Jacqueline, begs the cult members to spare her, to no avail.
The cultists kidnap Jacqueline and, over several hours, harangue her to drink from a glass of poison placed before her. When her will breaks and she reaches for the glass, Frances swipes the glass out of Jacqueline's hand and to the floor. The Palladists let Jacqueline leave, but they send an assassin to follow her. The assassin chases her through the streets with a switchblade, but she eludes him and returns to her rented room above Dante.
In the rooming house hallway, Jacqueline briefly encounters her neighbor, Mimi, a terminally ill young woman. Mimi confesses to Jacqueline that she is afraid to die, and plans to have one last night out on the town. Jacqueline enters her own apartment and apparently hangs herself; Mimi hears the thud of the chair falling over as she leaves for the evening.
Cast
Uncredited roles
Themes and analysis
Nihilism Most controversially, the film resolves with the suicide of one of the main characters (contrary to the spirit if not the letter of the Production Code). Film historian Steve Haberman, in his audio commentary for the 2005 Warner Bros. DVD release of the film, characterized Jacqueline as the film's philosophical center, noting her existentialist views: "Her life is the very nightmare version of life that Val Lewton portrays in many of his movies: a meaningless existence, trying to find meaning, always failing and in the end seeking a sort of peace through death." Film scholar J. P. Telotte echoed this sentiment, stating: "The Seventh Victim explores certain ineffable fears that always haunt the human psyche, especially a fear of meaninglessness or the irrational which can make death seem almost a welcome release from life."
Homoeroticism Critics have noted homosexual undercurrents running through the film, particularly in Jacqueline's character and her relationship with Frances, a cult member who is an employee at the company she formerly owned. The film was featured in Turner Classic Movies' Screened Out, which celebrated gay and lesbian themes in classical Hollywood cinema. Other film theorists, such as Harry M. Benshoff, author of Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (1997), have read the film's anchoring of its Palladist characters in Greenwich Village—a neighborhood with a history of gay and lesbian residents—as another prominent undercurrent. In his assessment of the film, Benshoff notes: "The Seventh Victim invokes the analogy in ways more sympathetic to homosexuality. While it could have easily fallen into the trap of using gay and lesbian signifiers to characterize its villains (i.e. homosexual = Satanist, as did Universal's The Black Cat in 1934), the film is much more complex than that." Additionally, Benshoff notes that while contemporary reviews did not comment on the film's homosexual undertones, they did note its "baffling" subtleties.
Production Development
The script for The Seventh Victim went through several incarnations in the pre-production process. One version focused on an orphan caught in a murder plot amid California's Signal Hill oil wells; in this narrative, the heroine needed to solve the orphan's identity, saving him from becoming the seventh victim of the unknown killer. This version of the script was re-written entirely by DeWitt Bodeen under the supervision of producer Val Lewton. The new plot followed a young woman who uncovers a cult of Satanists in Greenwich Village. Bodeen purportedly based his idea for the film on a real Satanic society he had encountered in New York. The script incorporated other elements of his experiences in New York: Jacqueline's cosmetics business, La Sagesse, was inspired by his previous work as a journalist reporting on cosmetic companies, and the Italian restaurant, Dante, was based on Barbetta, a restaurant in Manhattan's Theater District.
Filming Jacques Tourneur, who had previously directed a trio of horror films for Lewton at RKO—Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man—was originally slated to direct The Seventh Victim. However, Mark Robson, a Canadian editor who had worked as an assistant on Citizen Kane, was signed to direct instead, marking his directorial debut. It was shot over 24 days at RKO's Gower Street studio in Los Angeles, from May 5 to 29, 1943. The opening scene at the boarding school used the set featured in RKO's The Magnificent Ambersons, released the year before.
Post-production Mark Robson and John Lockert made multiple edits to the film during post-production, according to Lewton and Bodeen, resulting in a slightly "disjointed" narrative. Lewton's son spoke about this in a 2003 interview:
According to Joel Siegel in Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (1973), four key scenes were cut from the film, contributing to its narrative incoherence; among them are a sequence in which Gregory visits Mary at the kindergarten where she works, and Mary admits to him, "It would be easier if Jacqueline were dead." At the beginning of another scene—which remains in the final cut—Mary's supervisor says to her, "Aren't you the popular one? You've a visitor again," the last word making it clear she'd had an earlier visitor, Ward. A second excised scene features Judd visiting Natalie Cortez, pretending to be interested in joining the Palladists. The two discuss philosophical matters, mainly the notion that if good exists, evil exists, and one is free to choose between the two. Cortez reveals that she became a Palladist because "Life has betrayed us. We've found that there is no heaven on earth, so we must worship evil for evil's sake."
In a third excised scene, Judd again visits Natalie, indicating that he wishes to join the Palladists. In conversation, Judd unintentionally reveals that Jacqueline is staying with Mary at the rooming house. This makes the audience aware that the Palladists were able to trace Jacqueline to Mary's room to kidnap her. In the truncated theatrical print, how the Palladists found Jacqueline is left unclear. In a final scene that followed Jacqueline's suicide, Mary, Gregory, and Jason meet at the Dante restaurant. Gregory and Mary go off together, leaving Jason standing before the restaurant's mural of Dante and Beatrice, making clear his failure as an artist and lover. He says to himself: "I am alive, yet every hope I had is dead. Death can be good. Death can be happy. If I could speak like Cyrano ... then perhaps, you might understand."
Release The film premiered in the United States on August 21, 1943. Five days later, on August 26, according to the United States Copyright Office, it was registered for copyright by RKO Pictures. On September 17, 1943, the film opened theatrically at the Rialto Theatre in New York City. A total of $130,000 was spent on promotional material, including posters and lobby cards.