The teenager Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is summoned by the dean of her private school to come to her office. Mary learns that her tuition is late since her sister Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks), who is an industrialist of cosmetics in New York, is missing. Mary decides to travel to New York to seek her sister out. In her search for Jacqueline, she meets the lawyer Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), who married her sister, and the psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who seems to know Jacqueline's whereabouts. She discovers that Jacqueline's factory now belongs to her manager and a mysterious private eye offer to look for Jacqueline. Soon Mary learns that her sister joined a secret society that worships the devil that wants to kill her since she has disclosed their existence. What will Mary do?"The Seventh Victim" is a messy, boring and annoying film of horror genre at least in 1943. The plot is confused and senseless, with silly and ridiculous situations and dialogues. Kim Hunter in the role of a naive teenager is funny. Do not try to watch this film if you are tired; otherwise you will certainly nap. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "A Sétima Vítima" ("The Seventh Victim")

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is told that her older sister Jacqueline has disappeared. Instead of staying at her school to work, Mary sets off to find her sister. She finds a hangman's noose in Jacqueline's room. Private eye Irving August offers to help but he gets a warning. Then she finds Gregory Ward who was inquiring at the morgue. She joins August on his investigation and he's killed. On the subway, she encounters two men carrying August. The police won't believe her. Psychiatrist Dr. Judd claims to have Jacqueline but she sees her run away. She also finds out that Ward is actually Jacqueline's husband. Poet Jason Hoag offers to help.I love the paranoid darkness that runs through this movie. The shadowy look is great. There are all kinds of murky secrets and dangerous conspiracies. It's young Kim Hunter's first feature. She's a bit stiff and naive which fits the character very well. The story is very convoluted which keeps taking sharp turns with a few too many characters. Mary is overwhelmed and I would be too. It's highly questionable whether the movie makes complete sense. At the very least, there are a lot of coincidences.

"The Seventh Victim" stars Kim Hunter as Mary Gibson, a young woman who embarks upon a quest to find her missing sister. Assisting her are a private detective (Lou Lubin) and her sister's concerned husband (Hugh Beaumont).More sophisticated than was typical of 1940s, low-budget chillers, "Victim" watches as Mary stumbles upon a satanic cult. The existence of this cult is revealed in meticulous increments, Mary's "reality" slowly revealing itself to be nothing less than devilish; everyone around her seems to be secretly knee-deep in evil."The Seventh Victim" was part of a cycle of low-budget horror films by producer Val Lewton. Most of the better films in this cycle were directed by cult-favourite Jacques Tourneur. "Victim", however, was helmed by Mark Robson, Tourneur's assistant on a number of pictures. Like his mentor, Robson has a gift for ambiance, his film mixing noir tropes with a weird, bohemian atmosphere, the film's Greenwich Village locales filled with struggling poets, psychiatrists and strange cult members. These cult members are locked in an odd double bind; they're committed to a life of non-violence, but wish to kill in the name of Satan. Robson would revisit these contradictions in 1957's "Peyton Place", where sinister currents waft beneath an idyllic New England town.7/10 – Worth one viewing.

Living a secret life on the lower East Side, a group of devil worshipers seem to be an analogy for fifth columnists playing the spying game in New York in this combination of psychological horror and film noir. Broadway actress Kim Hunter made her film debut as the sweet younger sister of a missing woman. She drops out of college to head to New York to find her missing sister and stumbles upon something far more sinister than she could ever imagine.The dark shadows of the New York streets take front and center in this intriguing thriller that makes the night a villain and its characters simply players in a game of chess where both the winner and loser's grand prize is the same: death, where the fate is certainly worse. These streets are filled with odd noises, scary images and even today, when you venture down certain avenues in Manhattan, you may feel the same chills that the heroines here certainly felt, 70 years ago.The odd hairstyle of the missing sister (Phyllis Brooks) is pure Val Lewton with its severity even though the character is not meant to be evil, just mysterious. She appears almost death-like, a combination of "Dracula's Daughter" and "She Who Must Be Obeyed" as she first appears to put her finger up to her lips to "shhh" her sister in their first scene together as her presence is definitely meant as a metaphor. Death definitely does not take a holiday here, and the most evil that the devil worshipers get is to prod their intended victims onto suicide, making their meeting place feel like a room of "Rebecca's" Mrs. Danvers.The direction is appropriately grim and slow moving, giving it almost a feeling of floatation, with a scene in a shower that obviously influenced Hitchcock decades later. As imperfect as this film is, it is one that won't leave your mind, and one you will re-visit to try and find the many hidden metaphors and themes which its creators intended.