Movie Cults
TCM, beginning at 7 p.m.
It’s a night of literal cult classics on TCM as the network airs four horror movies with stories involving groups of fanatical devotees to various sinister causes. First is The Seventh Victim (pictured) (1943), one of the terrific supernatural-themed suspense films that Val Lewton produced in the 1940s and ’50s. Kim Hunter, in her film debut, plays a young woman who stumbles upon a secret cult of devil worshippers in Greenwich Village while searching for her missing sister. As with most of Lewton’s horror productions, this one very effectively relies largely on quieter, unseen psychological horror and a moody, shadowy ambience versus outright shocking scenes, evidenced best in a creepy shower scene that anticipated Psycho by nearly 20 years. One director who mastered that sort of understated horror while working on some Lewton-produced classics was Jacques Tourneur, and he directed tonight’s next film, the superb Curse of the Demon (1957). Dana Andrews stars as an American psychologist who travels to England to investigate a satanic cult suspected in some deaths. The doctor’s skepticism about the existence of supernatural evil is put to the test when he finds himself targeted by a curse put upon him by the cult’s leader (a terrific Niall MacGinnis). Although a special effects-created demon was forcibly inserted into a few shots against Tourneur’s wishes, it doesn’t detract too much from the intensifying horror that viewers feel along with the hero as he races to stop the curse before its deadline arrives. The evening ends with two TCM premiere movies. In Cult of the Cobra (1955), servicemen returning home to the States after running afoul of an Asian snake cult that worships a cobra goddess begin experiencing mysterious “accidents.” Finally, Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele and Boris Karloff, in one of his final roles, lead The Crimson Cult (1968, aka Curse of the Crimson Altar), about an old witchcraft cult that is found to still be active. —