The Seventh Victim

 Val Lewton's 1943 The Seventh Victim hits eerie notes that most American films can't even imagine.  The modestly proportioned film -- it's only 75 minutes long -- exploits species of dread that don't even have names.  Ostensibly directed by Mark Robson, a film maker who never really achieved anything else of substance, the picture is highly literate and boasts an intricate plot that has the uncanny coherence of nightmare -- it's a coherence of mood and atmosphere, not cause and effect.

A young woman attends a private school apparently confined within a sort of chapel with stained glass windows.  (We never see the exterior of the school).  The young woman's tuition is in arrears.  Her elder sister, Jacqueline, who pays for the girl's education has not sent funds recently and seems to have vanished.  From the very outset, the tone of these initial and purely expository scenes is distraught, almost hysterical.  The harridan who tells the heroine that she can't stay at the school has a weirdly aggressive manner and she is flanked by a girl who seems to be entranced -- when the initial conference, ends the girl rushes out into the corridor and tells the heroine that she should leave to find her sister in New York City and not make her mistake, that is, remaining at the school -- "you should never come back here," the girl says in a desperate voice.  This is spooky and totally unmotivated.  The film's concept seems to be that groups of people organized in any way are all sinister and should be avoided on pain of...what?  We don't know.  Transition shots in the first third of the movie are intentionally confusing.  The editing cuts from one scene to another location with a figure moving in the general direction that we anticipate based on the earlier shot -- but the figure turns out to be someone who is not involved in the narration and the character that we are following appears in the frame from some wholly unexpected angle.  At one point, the young heroine moves in one direction only to be grabbed by  her elbow and forcibly dragged the other way -- all of these effects are unobtrusive and have to be verified by running the images backward to see how the strange entrances and exits are contrived, but it's clear that a mood of subtle, if pervasive, uncertainty is created by these, almost invisible, means.  The film's method is to exploit every shot to create an atmosphere of disequilibrium and anxiety -- there are no empty images in this film; even the most quotidian shots have something strange about them, some curious detail in decor or staging or affect by the actors.  A good example is a cut from an exterior to a sort of white laboratory in which women are loading some kind of cauldron -- the place turns out to be a cosmetics factory, formally operated by the missing Jacqueline, but visualized as a clinical witch's coven.  One of Lewton's tricks is to delay the establishing shot until the end of the scene -- that is, we are shown some kind of eerie environment, deferring narrative information about that place, until the end (not the beginning) of the sequence.  An notable example of the film cramming unsettling information into expository shots is a sequence at a police station where the heroine attempts to file a missing person's report on her sister -- the camera tracks along a group of partitioned counters where we hear people reporting that loved ones are missing, just fragments of their pleas made to indifferent station-house cops:  it's an unsettling compendium of tragedies that we glimpse but can't exactly access because these stories are irrelevant to the movie's narration. A later scene at a morgue is adorned with an exterior in the mist with a huge bas relief inscription over the sinister doors:  HE HAS CALLED THEM EACH BY NAME.  I don't imagine any real morgue would be so dramatically labeled, but the inscription suits the narrative -- the big city is a place of shadows and darkness where people go to anonymously commit suicide; these unfortunate ones have names, but we don't know them.  A little cellar restaurant named after Dante sports a big mural of the poet encountering Beatrice near the river in Florence -- we see some large figures painted with their backs to us, a surreal sort of city-scape, a turbid-looking river.  Above the restaurant, there is an apartment with a locked door.  When the door is forced, we see a noose tied to hang over a chair by which to access this impromptu gallows -- otherwise the apartment is empty.  Next door to the suicide chamber, a woman named Mimi is dying of consumption -- we see her faded glamor as she staggers out of her room through the squalid corridor. 

The heroine discovers that her sister was involved with a handsome mannequin, an Admiralty lawyer played by Hugh Beaumont, the fellow who was the Beaver's paterfamilias in Leave it to Beaver.  This man's office is crammed with nautical artifacts.  These knick-knacks rhyme with a stained glass window at the Church-School in the opening scene, a highly stylized colored-glass image of Boecklin's "Isle of the Dead", a hooded mariner sailing a little bark toward an island where tall green cypresses stand on a rock-girt shore.  Most of the characters who appear in the film have the aspect of Charon -- they are shadowy figures who seem to usher the heroine toward her encounter with Death.  It's immediately clear that the lawyer, who seems to know next to nothing, is in love with the fresh-faced and innocent heroine -- and this is notwithstanding the fact that he has, in fact, married the vanished sister.  There's a poet of cadaverous aspect, a tall guy with an uniquely skeletal face -- he also seems to be in love with the heroine. (This man, played by Tim Conway, surely one of the ugliest actors ever to appear in films, is a poet who can no longer write verse --  somehow, his thwarted love for the heroine inspires him to new efforts.)  It turns out that Jacqueline, a ghostly figure with a pale, somewhat Asiatic-looking face and a helmet of black straight hair, has fallen into the clutches of a group of debonair Satan worshipers.  They are non-violent, in fact, have sworn a vow to harm no one, although their mere presence is a sort of death-infection at the center of the film.  In this movie, the villains are impotent -- only their bewitched victims can act.  The Satan worshipers gather around Jacqueline and urge her, apparently for hours, to drink poison -- the goblet sits in a place of prominence is a pool of light in front of the throne-like chair where she swoons.  Just as she is about to drink the potion, her blonde Lesbian lover knocks the glass f rom her hand.  Jacqueline, then, flees into the night and a bravura tour de force sequence follows in which she is menaced by various shadowy figures -- at one point, an apparition with a switchblade is about to knife her when a Greenwich Village theater opens at its stage door disgorging a merry crew of actors dressed in the costumes of ancient Romans.  The actors are indifferent to Jacqueline's plight, but, in the confusion, she escapes.  This sequence is intercut with the poet and a doctor, a wholly redundant character, denouncing the Satan worshippers who glare helplessly at these men -- again nothing comes out of the strange off-kilter encounter.  In another part of the film's labyrinth, Hugh Beaumont and the heroine are confessing their love for one another.  Forsaken, Jacqueline goes to her suicide chamber.  She meets Mimi who has decided to go out gaily dressed and dance with death -- she is wearing a slinky evening gown.  As the hectic and febrile Mimi goes to her fate, Jacqueline enters the suicide chamber and we hear the sound of the chair under the noose being knocked over.  This happens very fast and, if you aren't attentive, the viewer will miss the sound cue.  This is all wholly extraordinary -- the woman in distress, Jacqueline, has evaded her shadowy pursuers and escaped poisoning, only to commit suicide in a lonely, empty chamber above and deserted Italian restaurant.

There's one sequence which is like nothing else in American films.  The heroine and a pathetic, little gumshoe have entered a dark hallway in the cosmetics factory.  There is a locked room with a black door at the end of the corridor.  Neither of the characters dares approach the locked door.  The heroine says:  "It's just a little way.  Go ahead and see what's there."  The hapless detective is terrified.  "Go ahead," the heroine urges. "It's just a little way."  The sense of looming dread in the shadowy hall is overwhelming and the door way seems to possess some sort of magical repulsive force.  It's like scenes in Tarkovsky when a protagonist has to cross some shadowy place that is under a ban, some place where a hidden and deadly force is resisting entrance.  When the gumshoe approaches the black door, something happens and he comes out of the room with staring eyes and walking in a slow half-paralyzed gait.  (We learn a minute later that he's been eviscerated).  This is followed by an alarming descent into the underworld of a subway and an encounter with the disemboweled man's corpse in an empty subway car -- when the heroine tries to enlist aid, the others on the train are too drunk or desperately miserable to even acknowledge her.  A few minutes later, we see the prototype for Hitchcock's shower scene in Psycho, a sequence in which the heroine herself, face blurred by the semi-opaque shower curtain seems monstrous -- when she pokes her wet white face around the edge of the curtain, looking for a shadowy figure that has menaced her, it's the girl in peril who seems somehow to be the nightmare creature.  

The plot is full of overdetermined sequences, redundant characters whose roles are very hard to reconstruct when attempting to recount the plot -- there are strange nightmare spaces such as might be imagined by Piranesi (one of whose Roman prints appears on a wall)  or Escher.  For instance, two ornate staircases lead to the same space, an embodiment of the idea that all paths in this film lead to death.  One of the most curious things about the movie is that it is all surprising, all briskly shot and edited, full of uncanny dialogue and weird suggestions of sexual perversion and, somehow, quite tedious, even dull.  I can't exactly explain how this effect arises.  The plot is crammed with wild incidents and the movie is only 75 minutes long, but somehow it dilates time -- the picture is so dense with dread that it's a slog to get through it. The film is like the locked chamber at the end of the hall -- it's only a little way to traverse, but the path seems endless. Nonetheless, this is one of the most astonishing genre pictures ever made, a virtual inventory of sophisticated horror film techniques pioneered by Lewton and ubiquitous today and should be seen by anyone interested in the movies.

(The film's title means nothing -- Lewton was given the names for the films that he was supposed to produce for RKO but not scripts.  He developed the scripts himself.  The movies in this series were made on budgets of $150,000 apiece, shot on sets left over from other RKO films, and required to be 75 minutes or less in length.  the pictures were supposed to be the lower half of a double feature.)