The Seventh Victim (German: Das siebente Opfer) is a 1964 West German thriller film directed by Franz Josef Gottlieb and starring Hansjörg Felmy, Ann Smyrner and Hans Nielsen.
The film is based on a novel by Bryan Edgar Wallace, one of several films made in an attempt to capitalize on Rialto Film's successful series of adaptions of the novels of his father, Edgar Wallace. It was shot at Spandau Studios in West Berlin with sets designed by art director Hans Jürgen Kiebach and Ernst Schomer.
The film is also known by the alternative title The Racetrack Murders.
Lord John Mant (Walter Rilla) owns a prized thoroughbred horse favored to win the prestigious Royal Ascot race. But not everyone wants to see it cross the finish line. Someone is willing to kill to stop it, and the body count keeps rising.
Peter Brooks (Hansjörg Felmy), a cartoonist drawn into the chaos surrounding the Mant estate, finds himself untangling a web of betting fraud, shady inheritance schemes, and cold-blooded revenge. The murders grow more brazen with each victim: a snake thrown into a horse's path, a trumpet player shot mid-solo, others dispatched by pitchfork, harpoon, and hangman's noose. Inspector Bradley (Heinz Engelmann) works the case as the killings stack up around Lord Mant's inner circle.
At the center of it all lurks the menacing Ed Ranova (Wolfgang Lukschy), a ruthless loan shark squeezing Gerald Mant (Helmuth Lohner) dry, and the enigmatic Reverend Turner (Hans Nielsen), whose pious front masks something far darker. Avril Mant (Ann Smyrner), Lord John's daughter, gets pulled deeper into danger as Brooks races to expose a conspiracy rooted in a death that may not have been as final as it seemed, a man executed years earlier whose shadow appears to fall over every new crime.