The Seventh Victim

The Seventh Victim (1943)

Weird pagan rites in secret dens of exotic mystery! Beauty enslaved to a creed of Evil! Loveliness at bay behind a mask of Terror... See the strangest thrills on record!

After young Mary Gibson discovers that her older sister Jacqueline has disappeared, she leaves her boarding school and heads to New York City to track down her sibling. But Mary gets drawn deeper into the mystery.

Date of release
1943-08-21
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (165)
Runtime
1h 11m
Genres
Horror, Mystery
Director
Mark Robson

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Los Angeles

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.

Production

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.

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.

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:

[My father's] scripts were very specific about set design, camera direction, and also what you usually left to one editor—dissolves, cuts, and so on. Much of the confusion in The Seventh Victim would have been eliminated if scenes weren't cut. There was a final scene, after the woman hanged herself, that was just a horrible rehash, and it was wisely cut.

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 v…

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