Ah, Halloween, my favorite time of year. Christmas has better PR, for sure, but for my money, Halloween is the cat’s pajamas. Last year I reviewed four personal faves of mine, and it was a blast to revisit some of the strangest, weirdest horror films of the past thirty years. This year, well, let’s get it out of the way: this year has been one long horror movie, and we’ve all been the hapless, screaming saps running from 2020’s chainsaws. So this year I’m going to reduce the despair quotient and just cover one film: David Fincher’s 1995 masterpiece of darkness, Seven.
I can hear the screaming right now that Seven is a pyschological-thriller, a la Silence of the Lambs, but I think Seven shares more DNA in common with Alien than it does with Silence.
I saw Seven in theaters with a group of friends from high school and the prevailing emotion I recall from that experience was dread. Each minute that ticked by felt like a weight being placed on my chest, like my heart was in a vice that was slowly being cranked shut. I walked out of the theater, after the now legendary finale, smashed emotionally. I recall wanting to go right back in and see it again, and also the distinct sense that I never wanted to see it again. It was that affecting.
It goes without saying (though I’ll go ahead and say it) that I did, in fact, see this movie many times after that first, stunned viewing, and each time an additional layer of delicious deviousness was revealed to me. In many ways it’s a movie whose existence defies logic. Director David Fincher had essentially sworn-off directing after his traumatizing experience working on Alien 3, famously saying, “I thought I’d rather die of colon cancer than do another movie.” Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker wrote the first drafts of the story while working at Tower Records in New York, a city he admitted to not enjoying. The kid with the haunted eyes working the counter at Tower Records in 1991? You know, the one who gave you your change after you bought your cassette tape of Nirvana’s Nevermind? That kid? Yeah, probably not Andrew Walker. But it could have been!
There were also casting near-misses, like the role of Detective Mills being turned down by Sylvester Stallone (eek) and Denzel Washington (!). Al Pacino was considered for the role of Detective Somerset, too. Now, I love me some Pacino, but imagine the elegant, ASMR-like line readings of Morgan Freeman being replaced by Al in full Scent of a Woman/Heat Mode?
“There ARE…SEVEN deadly sins, CAPTAIN…and you got your head ALL THE WAY UP ‘EM! Ferocious, aren’t I? Hoo-A!”
Instead we got Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, directed by a once derided filmmaker who was about to become a legend, from a script written by a man who never quite reached these heights with his future work. And by some dark miracle, it worked.
I’m not going to minute-by-minute the plot, but I’m about to spoil the shit outta this movie from here, so if you haven’t seen Seven, please get off your ass, find it on your favorite streamer, return to your ass, and watch it. Git on, now. Onward.
Sometimes it’s tough to know when a film is going to be a rough ride. There’s nothing overtly upsetting about the title sequences in Full Metal Jacket, or Platoon; you find out how bent they are later. Seven doesn’t fuck around. It says, “Hold on tight, honey, ’cause shit’s about to get weird.”
In short order we are introduced to a pair of movie tropes: Detective David Mills (Pitt), an eager, ambitious, and young detective who is looking to make a name for himself; and Detective Lieutenant William Somerset, an aging, cynical, jaded, and literally days from retirement officer who is charged with getting Mills up to speed before he leaves.
This setup is so traditional, so reliable, that the audience is lulled into a false sense of normalcy. That these two characters will not mesh is a given. Mills requested to be transferred to this particular precinct, a fact that baffles Somerset. The name of the city is never mentioned, but you can basically take your pick of New York, L.A., or some other drear and depressing mega-city. What we come to find is that this place is actually Hell, and Somerset and Mills’s precinct is its innermost circle.
Their first case is the death of an enormous man, bound to a chair in his shabby, stifling home, forced to eat canned food until he croaks. It’s a disgusting, disturbing scene that sets the tone and direction of the movie. Mills picks up another case in which a high-profile defense attorney is forced to cut a pound of flesh from his own body, with the word “Greed” written in blood on the carpet. Somerset, a wily, clever detective, discovers the word “Gluttony” written in grease behind the refrigerator of the fat man, and he puts it together: they are dealing with a serial killer who is executing victims in the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. In the words of the Joker, “And here. We. GO.”
Somerset wants no part of this case, and Mills is all too happy to take the lead. The problem is that Somerset knows two things: Mills isn’t ready for this kind of case (boy, does that turn out to be true) and he’s unable to truly let go. Another thing neither man counts on is the intrusion of Mills’s lovely wife Tracy (pre-Goop, pre-vajayjay steaming, Gwyneth Paltrow). She invites Somerset to dinner at the Mills’s apartment and the power of her loveliness – and it cannot be overstated how lovely she is – binds the two men together. It’s hard not to consider the irony as this horrible disaster unfolds.
The horror of Seven is in the details, and in Fincher’s ability to pivot when circumstances dictate it. The film was shot primarily in Los Angeles, which isn’t known for its precipitation, and yet on the first day of shooting for Brad Pitt it was a torrential downpour. Pitt was only with them for fifty-five days, as he was about to shoot 12 Monkeys, so this could have been a problem. Fincher, ever the planner, had brought in rain machines just in case something like this were to happen, and he saw an opportunity to crank the grungy look of his film to 11.
The rain, constant until the final scenes of the film, soaks our two detectives. Somerset, an experienced, world-weary cop, bears this deluge better than Mills, who gets more and more out of sorts. You see Mills’s drenched shirts and slacks and you can practically feel the water squishing in his shoes, driving him a little crazy. It’s as if nature – God, perhaps? – is set against these men on their quest.
The detectives spend the first part of their investigation chasing their target’s red herrings as he leads them by the nose from victim-to-victim. Then another detail emerges, one so prescient that it gives me chills today, and it’s how the two officers get their first real break in the case. Somerset knows a guy in the FBI who tracks – illegally, mind you – the reading habits of American citizens. He explains it thusly:
Of course a killer working off the Seven Deadly Sins would be an avid reader of Paradise Lost and Dante, and of course a man like Somerset, who sees the evil of the world in stark relief, would read the same things and understand their ability to guide them towards their killer. Mills couldn’t give a shit (“Fucking Dante!”); he just wants Somerset to tell him what they’re doing and why.
This leads us to another detail of the film that I love: Mills is kind of a dumbass. He’s not dumb in the sense that he’s unintelligent, he’s just a bit of a goober. You watch him play with his dogs at home, or the way he seethes when Somerset is patiently telling him how they’ll find their killer, or in his later interactions with John Doe, and you just come away with the distinct impression that Mills is a well-meaning dunderhead. He’s emotional, impulsive, and volatile. It makes the ending all the more tragic because we realize that both detectives, but Mills most of all, have been outmatched this whole time.
Utilizing their ill-got leads, Mills and Somerset make it outside the apartment door of a suspect, and a chase ensues. This chase reveals something that should trouble us, but on a first viewing maybe you just wave it off.
The killer lets Mills live. Why? He can’t be sure Mills can’t ID him, and he’s certainly not afraid to murder…so why? This question gets more disturbing when they get into the apartment.
Mills has caught the eye of our killer. Again, maybe you brush this away on a first sit-through, but on subsequent viewings you notice it and you dread it. The killer isn’t trying to match wits with the stoic Somerset; no, he has his sights on Mills, the emotional tinderbox.
In your everyday, run-of-the-mill thriller, we would continue apace, seeing one horrendous murder after another, until finally, predictably, our heroes find the one clue, the hidden detail, that cracks the case and sends us into the heart-stopping final act. Fincher plays along with these rules for quite a while, then he smirks like the Devil and goes for broke.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Sitting in the theater, amazed by the movie, but not yet awed, following along with the rules of the thriller. Mills and Somerset are walking and talking, no closer to the killer than they were a week earlier, and the sun is shining (watch Mills regard it like he’s seeing it for the first time in ages) and then, without warning, the floor falls out and we’re in free fall.
“What. The. Fuck.”
I said that out-loud in the theater a quarter century ago and nobody in the darkened room admonished me, because everyone was thinking the same fucking thing. What. The. Fuck.
To this day, when he screams that last time – DE-TEC-TIVE!!! – it sends electric shocks down my spine. We’ve just met John Doe, and my lord, it’s Kevin Spacey. Spacey’s name was not listed in the marketing (a smart move by Spacey and Fincher that couldn’t be done in today’s information stealing environment) and he appeared nowhere in the credits until the end. He turns himself in and steals the movie.
Everyone raves about the ending – What’s in the box??? – and it’s amazing…but this scene was the first time in my life that I was aware that a film could make its own rules, that a movie could tell an audience, “You think you know where this is going, but you’re wrong. You got on a train and thought you knew the route, but I have bad news for you: the conductor is a madman. Next stop, Crazy Town.”
John Doe has two more victims to reveal, and he will do it, but Mills and Somerset must follow his every instruction. Being a Mr. Smarty-Pants back in ’95, I knew he had two more Sins left to reveal: Wrath and Envy. I was trying to sort out how John Doe would execute his master plan (for the record, none of my scenarios came within a thousand miles of the actual plot), when John Doe took the wheel of the film and hypnotized me and everyone else.
Note: Sorry for the subtitles on this video. It’s the only one I could find that shows the entire car ride.
First note how John Doe is fixated on Mills. He wants to steer clear of Somerset; in fact, he almost seems a bit frightened by Somerset’s intellect. Second…John Doe kinda has a point…? Hear me out! When looked at through a lens of suffering, and inhumanity, is he any worse than the lazy pedophile (Sloth), the defense attorney putting criminals back on the street (Greed), or the mega-man slowly eating himself to death in his grimy home (Gluttony)? I’m not saying he’d be a cool hang or anything, just that his reasoning has a captivating melody. Third, and most importantly, do you feel the horror of his monologue? I did then and still do today. It’s his surety isn’t it? The way he is so confident in the outcome. It’s the horror of inevitability.
Finally, horribly, we come to the box and the truth. John Doe completes his masterpiece and nothing we could do could have stopped it. Even now, after so many critics have had their shot at it, after so much analysis and scholarship, there are still things to see that upset and amaze. I won’t try to re-litigate the scene, as it’s been done better elsewhere, but I would like to point something out. Check the scene again and watch closely when John Doe drops the knife-twisting reveal that Tracy was pregnant.
Did you see it? John Doe knew that Tracy was pregnant, but he also knew that Somerset knew. Mills gives Somerset a look so full of hurt and betrayal, it’d break your heart if it weren’t already being crushed in John Doe’s hands. He took that warm, human, and touching encounter between Somerset and Tracy, and he turned it against both men to drive them apart and to close the circle.
And that’s it. John Doe wins. There is an ending of sorts, with Somerset giving us another short monologue, but who fucking cares? Which brings me to the last thing that makes this a horror movie: David Fincher’s view of humanity. It’s fair to say that Fincher has a low opinion of the entire enterprise of our species. Look at his body of work and you’ll see a filmmaker who does not view homo-sapiens in terms of what we could be at our best, but in terms of what we are at our worst. Let John Doe explain, and listen close, because you can feel Fincher in the words.
Talk at ya later.
Averil Dickerson 