THE SEVENTH VICTIM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 268, 11 August 1944, Page 30

THE SEVENTH VICTIM

(RKO-Radio)

‘THIs is a real collector’s piece; an item which I warmly commend to the notice of all connoisseurs of the macabre. It was produced by

| somebody called Val Lewton, who is a

new name to me, but it seems he specialises in "creepies.’ He doesn’t belong to the Frankenstein-Mummy’s Ghost school, though-he’d be expelled for not playing ball with the boys. He specialises in horror stories in the way in which Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce specialised in them; in fact, if you can imagine Poe or Bierce making a film, The Seventh Victim is the kind of film they would make. If I say that it is all about a schoolgirl who has lost trace of her sister, and a cult of devil-worshippers in modern New York, that is true enough-but it is about as satisfactory in giving you an idea of this film’s peculiarly fascinating flavour as it would be to say that Poe’s "Fall of the House of Usher" deals with a premature burial. For genuine thrills and a pervading atmosphere of horrid suspense I can, offhand, think of no film to touch this little masterpiece, and none of the thrills and suspense are obtained by the orthodox chain-clanking, horrid-face-pulling methods. The audience is left to scare itself. The producer merely opens the door a crack: it is up to you whether you venture inside and give yourself a really enjoyable fright. Naturally it depends on yourself, too, whether the fright is enjoyable. Not the least of this picture’s unusual features is its authentic literary quality. One doesn’t, in a Hollywood shocker, expect casual yet important references to Cyrano de Bergerac or La Boheme, any more than one expects to find a young poet who behaves like a normal person. And it is certainly unusual to find such a film deriving its there from two lines by the mystic poet, John Donne: "I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday." As it happens, nobody is guilty of murder in this story; of the two sudden deaths which occur one is an accident, the other a suicide. But as that quotation suggests, there is a preoccupation with death and the unseen which, though it may not exactly produce a feeling of gaiety in the onlooker, certainly produces tension. Now then, you grisly epicures, if you want a good shudder you know where to go for it.