HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 71
Six decades: 2nd of 2 films from the 40's

What an incredibly odd film The Seventh Victim is.

I'm no stranger to Val Lewton's peculiarly oblique approach to classic horror tropes. In fact, Lewton had a habit of subverting all horror tropes established before and since his sadly brief tenure as a producer, to the point where the only "classic" things about his films are the era in which they were made and the fact that they're really good. The point is, RKO's Lewton-produced films were like nothing made before and, I'd argue, were like nothing made afterwards until the rise of indie horror in the 2010's. To me, these films are very much "art-horror".

But even coming in with those kinds of stylistic expectations, I was a little confounded by The Seventh Victim. It almost feels like a movie set in a parallel world, where all emotion has been subdued and everybody goes through their existence as if in some kind of daze. On the surface, this is a movie about a nefarious coven of Satanists - but these are the least evil Satanists I've ever encountered in a film. They seem more like a Neighbourhood Watch committee (Neighbourhood Witch?)

Kim Hunter plays the plucky damsel without much in the way of real distress. We get her missing sister's husband (Hugh Beaumont) set up as a love interest, which is itself odd, but the oddness is exacerbated by the fact that neither of them ever seem to show any feelings for one another until another character points it out. Dr Louis Judd (Tom Conway in another delightfully unctuous performance) seems an obvious villain - both in his contact with the Satanists and with his general supercilious demeanour (when a woman approaches him for help with alcoholism he just sniffs and says "Dipsomania is a very sordid condition" and walks away). And yet he seems to be one of the good guys?

Then we have the local poet, Jason Hoag (in a bizarrely wooden performance from Erford Gage, which also sounds like a made-up name) who inexplicably butts in to help Mary, solves the mystery almost immediately, and then subverts our expectations that he must have carried a flame for her by immediately passing her off to Beaumont's character. And finally we have Mary's sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks - black wigged so as to be unrecognisable from her blonde coiffed lead in The Leopard Man) who is the hysterical female at the centre of the intrigue but who seems barely fussed about it. At one point, the Satanists attempt to kill her by all standing around her and trying to talk her into drinking poison to kill herself, which she resists by making the obvious response - which is basically to shake her head and say "No". Then they let her go.

All this sounds like criticism, but I don't mean it as such. The thing is, it all feels very deliberate on Lewton's and Mark Robson's part. These are two guys who we know were highly competent film makers, so one wonders what they were going for here. It certainly gives the film a unique character and mood - I don't think I've seen anything like it before. There's a general obliqueness to the denouement as well, and I'm not at all sure I grasped the meaning of its final moments - the end credits hit me as a total surprise, because the film didn't seem to be finished. But the mood and atmosphere, laid on thickly by Nicolas Musuraca's astounding signature chiaroscuro cinematography, is intoxicating. In fact, this is a film that makes you feel like you're under the influence of some psychotropic substance - coming out of the film is a bit like waking up from a woozy but pleasant trance going "Wha...?"

We need a Lewton blu-ray set people!!! I need to see these films in a proper scan - they would look incredible!