A Matter of Life and Death: Externalizing Internal Struggles in ‘The Seventh Victim’

One of the unique aspects of the horror films produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the 1940s is the seriousness with which they discuss matters of mental illness. Even today, mental health issues are often tiptoed around, but in the forties, they were practically taboo. As discussed in previous entries in this column, Cat People (1942) is largely about repression and The Body Snatcher (1945) deals with guilt, paranoia, and psychopathy. The Seventh Victim (1943), one of the lesser-seen entries in the Lewton cycle, is about loneliness, the depression that stems from it, and suicidal ideation. It externalizes the inner struggles between the light and darkness that use the mind as a battlefield and demand a choice between life and death. Because of the unflinching way The Seventh Victim approaches the subject of suicide, this should be a considered a content warning for the discussion to come later. But first, some background on the film itself.

Val Lewton had produced three successful films with director Jacques Tourneur, Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and The Leopard Man (1943). RKO felt that they could have even more success by splitting up this team and promoting them to “A pictures,” with bigger budgets, more resources, and therefore more prestige in the eyes of critics and the industry. Tourneur moved directly to the war film Days of Glory (1944) and would soon make the noir masterpiece Out of the Past (1947). Lewton would be tasked with finishing the rest of the genre films on his docket before taking his promotion. He laid out the schedule with his choices of cast and crew, including Mark Robson, the editor of the first three films, to direct The Seventh Victim and presented it to RKO. The studio scoffed at this choice and Lewton was forced to choose between the promotion and loyalty to his friend—he chose loyalty and went on to produce six more of the greatest horror films of the forties.

Because of Lewton’s belief in him, Robson was determined to make the best film he could, and in many ways continued the style created by Lewton and Tourneur. As in the earlier films, the protagonist of The Seventh Victim is a woman, the characters have jobs, and there is a clear stylistic quality that would later be dubbed “film noir” by French critics. Like many noir films (and German Expressionism, the movement that partially inspired it), The Seventh Victim features a number of characters that act as thematic doubles or doppelgangers. These characters are often dark and light reflections of one another, most clearly exemplified by Mary Gibson (Lewton discovery Kim Hunter) and her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks), but also other characters throughout the film notably the naïve poet Jason Hoag (Erford Gage) and the cynical Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway essentially reprising his role from Cat People). Though they fulfill archetypal roles, they are certainly not two-dimensional, black and white characters, but deeply complex individuals carrying within themselves many shades of grey.

Several other elements of the previous Lewton films find their way into The Seventh Victim—literary allusions, queer (specifically lesbian) subtext, and the “Night Walk” are just a few of them. The result is the unsung masterpiece of the RKO-Lewton cycle.

The film follows Mary as she leaves a religious all-girls school for New York City to find her more sophisticated and worldly sister Jacqueline who has inexplicably disappeared. The film’s central mystery is not revolutionary in and of itself but the way the film uses it to meditate upon its various subtextual elements is. Early in the film, the mystery reveals The Seventh Victim’s central metaphor: a hangman’s noose suspended above an empty chair in a sparse room. The specter of suicide hangs like that noose over much of the film. Mary soon meets Gregory Ward, played by Hugh Beaumont who would become most famous for playing another Ward—Ward Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver, who discusses Jacqueline’s preoccupation with death. “Your sister had a feeling about life. That it wasn’t worth living unless one could end it.” The noose is a representation of the depression that comes from the loneliness experienced by most of the characters in the film.

Jacqueline sought to assuage her loneliness by becoming involved with a small cultic group called the Palladists, described in the film as “a society of Devil worshippers.” The Seventh Victim is never sensationalist about this element of the story. They are a sophisticated, serious, and pacifistic group, but also highly secretive and the penalty for divulging their existence to an outsider is death. Jacqueline had begun seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, and they believe, though are not entirely certain, that she told him about them. According to one of the group members, only six of their number have historically discussed the group to outsiders before and all died, making Jacqueline the intended seventh victim. Being pacifists, however they do not intend to kill her in a violent manner but by convincing her to commit suicide.

For a time, they lock her in the empty room with the noose, hoping she will take her life. Later, in one of the most beautifully photographed though suspenseful sequences of the film, a goblet of poisoned wine is placed before her and the Palladists take turns trying to convince her to drink. The entire day passes, subtly indicated by the changes in lighting before she is finally allowed to leave. She is given the option to refuse to take her life throughout the film, but the members of the cult act like the incessant chattering of a troubled mind. This is just one of several sequences that externalize the internal struggle with depression and suicidal ideation and is followed immediately by one of the most potent, the film’s “Night Walk.”

Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man before it, as well as Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Body Snatcher after, all feature a Night Walk in which a character is pursued in the dark by a real or perceived threat. In The Seventh Victim, Jacqueline is followed through the shadowy streets of Greenwich Village by a sinister looking man with a knife. Film historian Steve Haberman calls him a “satanic hit man” in the audio commentary for the film, but it is not necessarily established that he was sent by the cult. Whether or not he was is immaterial; it is what he represents that matters. He is the personification of Jacqueline’s depression and the suicidal ideation that seeks to destroy her. It is important to note that she wants to escape him, just as she resisted the noose and the poisoned drink. At the end of the walk, he nearly captures her outside a theater when the backstage door swings open and he is blinded by the light that shines into the street and banished by the laughter of the actors. He disappears into the shadows and Jacqueline is invited by the troupe to join them in an evening of revelry at a local bar. She stands outside for a moment, listening to the joy within before disappearing into the shadows herself and walking to the apartment that houses the hangman’s noose.

The end of the film presents us with a fork in the road. Jacqueline returns to the apartment, room number 7, and her neighbor, Mimi (Elizabeth Russell), who resides in number 8, meets her at the top of the stairs. She tells Jacqueline of the sickness that is eating away at her and that she plans to get dressed up and go out for one last evening of real living before she dies. At the end of the scene, both go into their rooms. We later see Mimi in an evening gown with her hair and makeup done, and we hear the sound of a falling chair as she passes Jacqueline’s room. Jacqueline’s choice is neither affirmed nor condemned, merely presented, but she has given in to the will of her tormentors, the Palladists. She has become their seventh victim, residing in number seven, a number of completion, even ending. Mimi, in number eight, the number of new beginnings and possibilities, though physically dying, has chosen to live every moment of life she has available to her before her disease takes the opportunity from her.

By depicting these extremes, the film presents a more universally relatable choice to the audience, less radical than life and death. It is a fact of human existence that all of us will someday by some means die; there is simply no avoiding it. Most of us have no idea when the end will come, but we are all terminal cases. The choice we are presented with is what we will do with the time we have. Will we enjoy life or merely endure it? Proving the complex attitude of the film, it does not force one answer or the other upon its audience but provokes the question for each viewer to answer for themselves. In a sense it is a rhetorical question because we all know the “right” answer is to live, not merely survive. But knowing that does not make putting it into practice any easier. For so many, myself included, the voices of society, social media, depression, loneliness, and so on can be overwhelming and debilitating. We are so often presented with where we “should” be by whatever point in life we have reached. That if we have not met the “normal” benchmarks of life and the expectations of success, we have failed. But the fact is, as illustrated by Mimi in her final moments of the film, it is never too late to fight against those voices and choose to really live.

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