Classic of the Week: "The 7th Victim"
Val Lewton's 1943 chiller about devil worshipers in New York City is on TCM
DVR alert! “The 7th Victim” (1943) comes to Turner Classics Friday (9/10) at 8:00 p.m. A thoroughly unnerving and, for its time, quite daring drama about a Satanic cult in Greenwich Village, it’s the fourth of producer Val Lewton’s terrific little horror films for RKO, all of them subtly eerie thanks to Lewton’s personal tastes and his decided lack of budget. (If you can’t afford to show something scary, Lewton reasoned, just suggest it and let the audience’s imagination do the rest.) “Victim” is also the first movie for Kim Hunter, who’d go on to fame as Stella in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Zira in “Planet of the Apes.” That said, the person you’ll remember is Jean Brooks as Hunter’s sister, lost to the cult and coming on like an early screen incarnation of Morticia Addams.
The movie itself is a crucial forerunner of “Rosemary’s Baby” in its exploration of the demons lurking within all those swank New York sophisticates. (Also, check the trailer below for a possible influence on a certain scene in Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”) But the original stands on its own. “The 7th Victim” has an unsettling and inconsolable knowledge of the dark that gets under your skin and stays there, and how director Mark Robson got that pitch-black ending past the Production Code Office remains a mystery. (If you miss it on TMC, the movie’s available as a two-dollar rental on Amazon Prime Video.)