As a longtime booster of The Cat People, I tended to give the credit to its director Jacques Tourneur (later to helm Out of the Past). Seeing The Seventh Victim, also from Val Lewton's B-movie unit at RKO, changed all that. It seems Lewton was the resident genius, cobbling together stylish horror/suspense films on shoestring budgets. The young Kim Hunter, away at a private school, learns that her tuition hasn't been paid because her sister, owner of a beauty empire, has disappeared. She leaves school and starts scouring New York's Greenwich Village (also the locale of much of The Cat People) only to uncover a cult of devil worshipers. Lewton's thrillers haven't dated the way James Whale's, for instance, have, possibly because they depend so heavily on suggestion; the literalness of today's "horror" films is completely alien to these suggestive, truly chilling films. The RKO B-movie unit under Lewton was also, probably, a major influence on the look of film noir, soon to become the cutting-edge aesthetic in American movies. This is as tense and satisfying a 75 minutes as you'll find until the Mann/Alton team's seminal noirs of a few years later.
Review of The Seventh Victim
