I first saw "The Seventh Victim" on TV when I was a highschool teenager in New Jersey in 1960. I had no film knowledge, no idea of who Val Lewton was. Our local station Channel 9 had the rights to the RKO film library, and simply tossed "The Seventh Victim" into a 90-minute time-slot (a 71 minute movie interrupted every 10 minutes with a blast of commercials). Even so, seeing this movie under the worst possible circumstances, I was nonetheless hypnotized by its eerie, morbid, downright shocking handling of a fairly typical thriller premise: A young girl (the luminous Kim Hunter, in her first film) is informed by the staff of the Catholic girls' school she attends that her sister, who lives in New York City and owns a thriving women's fragrance emporium, has not paid her tuition bills for several months and has apparently vanished. Ms. Hunter goes to Manhattan to find her sister, whom she traces to the West Village, where the rest of the story is set. A trustful, kind-hearted innocent girl suddenly thrust into a series of increasingly frightening situations populated by a huge cast of supporting characters (and nobody is quite what meets the eye), Ms. Hunter and the viewer are sent down a series of dark alleys that eventually culminate in the most terrifying, nerve-needling, shocking ending of any film I have ever seen. "The Seventh Victim" has stayed in my mind (and haunted my dreams) ever since I first saw it. I now live in New York and have scoured the West Village for the locations of the scenes in "The Seventh Victim" (which, of course, was shot on the RKO Greenwich Village backlot--but is a perfect replica of the deceptively beautiful West Village as it appears even today: cobblestoned streets, majestic townhouses converted into brownstone apartments, cozy, family-run Italian restaurants, and the most colorful, fascinating, complex and entrancing people you'll neet anywhere in the entire world. This mis en scene is captured perfectly in "The Seventh Victim," which another reviewer on this website so perfectly described as a series of Edward Hopper paintings brought to sinister,yet alluring, black-and-white life. I won't go into plot details, since they have been well-covered by other IMDB reviewers. Hitchcock obviously saw this film and used its terrifying shower scene for the centerpiece of "Psycho." To this day, this modest, unpretentious, off-beat chiller remains relatively unknown (except for film-buffs), yet when I showed it to my guests at a dinner party a few years ago, they gradually fell under its creepily hypnotic spell, and, towards the end, when Ms. Hunter's sister is stalked by an unknown killer on the darkened Village streets, a quick camera shot of the stalker reaching into his pocket and pulling out a switchblade made three of my guests scream, How "The Seventh Victim" ever got past the censors in 1943 I'll never know I've read that the film had a strong lesbian undertone that drove the members of the Hays Office into cardiac arrest. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea, nor do I care. The artists who made "The Seventh Victim" created a true work of art-a poetic, chilling, ravishing masterpiece--a pretentious word I've never applied to any other movie, but will, without hesitation, apply to the most intelligent, audacious and spellbinding movie I have ever seen.