The Seventh Victim is a strange little movie. At only 71 minutes, it moves at a breakneck speed, not unlike other noir thrillers like D.O.A. or The Phantom Lady, and although this is billed as a horror picture, it bears much more resemblance to the former genre. That contemporary audiences found it muddled and somewhat difficult to follow is not a surprise, as this is also a hallmark of some of the great staples of film noir, like The Big Sleep. You’ll notice that all of those linked titles are to reviews from yours truly in this year alone. I seem to have inadvertently turned 2025 into my personal year of reflecting back on the noir genre, which I didn’t realize until Brandon pointed out that every single Lagniappe podcast episode we have done since the beginning of July has been some kind of detective or otherwise noir-adjacent film. Even when we recently attempted to divert into more spooky-season appropriate fare, we only found ourselves viewing a double feature of horror movies which also played out like investigative dramas (The Undying Monster and 13 Ghosts). I didn’t expect that I would continue that trend with The Seventh Victim, but here we are. It’s also a prequel to Cat People?

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter in her debut role) is summoned to the office of the headmistress of her school and is informed that her sister has stopped paying tuition. They offer her the opportunity to go to New York and find her sister, and promise that she can return to the school and finish her education with a kind of work study program, but a sympathetic teacher tells Mary that she was given this same deal once and regrets taking it, as it kept her from getting out into the world. Once she arrives in the city, Mary goes to the cosmetics company that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks) owned, only to discover that Jackie sold the business to her business partner, Esther Redi (Mary Newton). One of the cosmetologists, Frances (Isabel Jewell), tells Mary that she saw Jackie the week before with a handsome man at a restaurant named Dante’s. It’s here that Mary discovers that Jackie rented a small room, and when she is allowed inside, she finds only a noose and a simple wooden chair, a macabre scene. Mary wistfully admits that Jackie always had a morbid preoccupation with suicide and dying on her own terms. Mary ends up meeting three men who seemingly assist her in locating her sister: Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), a handsome lawyer who is secretly married to Jackie; Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), a fellow tenant in the rooms above Dante’s and a lapsed poet; and Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), reprising his role from Cat People (in which he was killed), appearing here as Jackie’s psychiatrist. When a private eye Mary hires to find Jackie ends up killed and she sees strange men covering up the murder, she begins to unravel a conspiracy. 

This all sounds like a typical non-horror mystery plot, but it’s not long before we learn that Jackie admitted to Dr. Judd that she had been inducted into a group of Satan-worshippers known as “Palladists,” and that she had since become fearful of them. Although he was slow to believe her, he does agree to hide her, hence the reason that she seemingly disappeared. In the interim, the disciples of her cult have been searching tirelessly for her, and with it now appearing that Jackie was the person who killed the private detective, it’s only a matter of time before the police find her, and their creed requires that Jackie must die before she can reveal any more about the secret society.

There’s nothing supernatural at play here, or even anything that could be ambiguously occult. The Palladists here are fairly spooky, sure, but they’re also kind of like if you took all of Rosemary Woodhouse’s neighbors and made them much less malicious. Their organization is also completely dedicated to non-violence, which means that when they decide that Jackie must die, they simply abduct her to one of their apartments, put a poisoned chalice in front of her, and spend an entire day peer pressuring her into drinking it. It rides the line between goofy and spooky, and it’s only because of the intense noir-style shadow and camera work that it manages to be effective. When this fails, they also just let her go, although they send a switchblade wielding assassin after her; this results in a truly fantastic chiaroscuro chase sequence through the darkened city streets. This is a gorgeously photographed film, and it has one of the most nihilistic endings I’ve ever seen. I won’t spoil it for you, but Jackie ultimately escapes from her pursuers but not from herself, and when she returns to Dante’s she runs into one of the other neighbors, a terminally ill woman named Mimi (get it?) who has decided that she is going to go out for one last night of frivolity no matter how sick she feels, while Jackie seems defeated. The Bechdel Test is a dubious metric even on the best of days, but it’s worth noting that this film passes, in this scene between Mimi and Jackie, which is as unusual a twist as the presence of a Satan-worshipping cult. 

The complaints that The Seventh Victim is disjointed are not without merit. I’m generally willing to forgive this in older titles, especially as many surviving films that we do have from this era and the decades preceding it are incomplete, and I’ve gotten fairly accustomed to recognizing that sometimes I’m just going to have to accept that it’s on my imagination to fill in those gaps. As it turns out, this film was edited down to its current short runtime by director Mark Robson himself, at least according to interviews with his son given after Robson’s death. This means that we are missing some significant chunks, and there are definite seams where the film has had something spliced out; for instance, there is a scene where the principal of the school where Mary finds herself working in the city while she looks for her sister tells her that she has “another” visitor, pointing to a scene that was left on the editing room floor. The absence of some of these scenes is felt, but while I can’t know what the film looked like in a more complete form, I also don’t think that the film is lacking too much without them. This is an excellent little horror thriller with an unusual premise for the time, and it makes for a fun (and low commitment) viewing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond