Monday, 4 March 2019 at 8:40 pm – Monday, 4 March 2019 at 11:00 pm
Bigger Than Life/The Seventh Victim Introduction
Date: Monday 4th March 2019
Time: 8.40pm
Location: HOME
Tickets: £9, concessions available - Book here
Bigger Than Life curate special screenings of under-shown and overlooked cinema.
In the early 1940s, RKO assembled a B-horror movie unit with the remit of challenging the dominance of Universal’s horror franchise. Headed by former David O Selznick protégé Val Lewton, all were made on a shoestring budget with the intention of delivering the audience demand for thrills, with more psychologically complex treatment of the uncanny. The series of films made between 1942 and 1946 managed to be both hugely profitable for the studio and visually audacious, startling explorations of the human psyche.
The Seventh Victim is, on the surface, an intense, set-piece driven chiller about a teenager (a debutant Kim Hunter; Oscar winner for A Streetcar Named Desire) searching a shadowy Greenwich Village, New York to find her missing sister, who may have become involved with a sinister cabal of devil worshippers. Hiding just beneath the surface is a film that radically discusses themes of rigid social repression and suicide, with an overt suggestion of a lesbian relationship that was extremely rare for 1940s Hollywood. Its gut-punch ending remains one of the most shocking of the era.
This screening will be introduced by Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley from Manchester Metropolitan University and Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. Chloé will discuss queer and feminist politics in Gothic cinema. Chloé is Senior Lecturer in English and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she teaches courses on Gothic Cinema, Children's and Young Adult literature and supervise PhD research projects in various aspects of Gothic literature, film and popular culture. Chloé has diverse research interests within Gothic Studies. Her first book explores 21st century children's Gothic literature and film, but she has also written on Zombies, Weird Fiction, Postcolonial Gothic, and Witches. Chloé is a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies and the Manchester Game Studies Network.
This screening will be delivered courtesy of a 35mm archive print sourced from the British Film Institute.