“I run to Death and Death meets me as fast, and all my Pleasures are like Yesterday”: this epigraph by John Donne sets the grim mood for The Seventh Victim, a thoroughly eerie vision of the city with its constant unknowns, its shadows like looming voids. Lewton's New York is peopled by an unholy lot of sleazy private eyes, sleek psychiatrists, cultists, and failed poets who seem to welcome rigor mortis with open arms. Something dreadful always seems just to have happened, or to be about to happen—offscreen, where we can't do anything about it. Into this world is drawn a holy innocent, an orphaned woman (Kim Hunter) searching for her sister and finding her to be a member (and the next intended victim) of a cult of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village. Said to be Lewton's most personal film, certainly it is the one in which his romantic obsession with death permeating life is most palpably recreated.
—Judy Bloch