Rapid Response: The 7th Victim (Patreon)

There's a new series at the Cinema Museum as the Gothique Film Society (in its 54th year and yet I'd never heard of it) has moved its meetings. The first screening was a double-bill of Cat People and The Seventh Victim. I'm sure we all know and love Cat People (though it was good to see it on the big screen), but The 7th Victim was new to me. Like Cat People it was part of RKO's low budget horror cycle produced by Val Lewton, which also includes I Walked with a Zombie and The Body Snatcher. The 7th Victim was the 4th in the cycle and is very different to Cat People, more like a film noir with some horror elements (it's set against the background of a Satanist society). In fact the script seems to have been written as a straight thriller about a missing person then rewritten to suit Lewton's mandate. But whatever its origins, the finished film is brilliant. The story isn't as fantastic as Cat People (which is a very high bar), but it's every bit as well made; incredibly tense and beautifully shot. Interestingly, it can also be seen as a prequel to Cat People because Tom Conway's psychiatrist Louis Judd, who dies in Cat People, appears again. But The 7th Victim saves its best moment for the end, which unfortunately I can't find a way of talking about without spoiling it.
I've still only seen half of the 8 films of the cycle and I'm delighted to learn that yet another entry is this good, and it increases the chances that we cover the films in a special at some point. There's a story behind the series too, albeit not a happy one; it was very successful but was still cancelled by new management, which destroyed Lewton himself.