"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. Val 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 seems always to just have happened, or be about to happen--offscreen where we can't do anything about it. Into this world is drawn a holy innocent, Kim Hunter as an orphaned woman searching through Gotham for her sister and finding her to be a member--and the next intended victim--of a cult of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village. The Seventh Victim, Val Lewton's first film without director Jacques Tourneur (it was editor Mark Robson's first directorial effort) is said to be Lewton's most personal film, based in part on his own experiences in New York. Certainly, it is the film in which his romantic obsession with death permeating life is most palpably recreated.