Horror was at a low ebb for the first half of the 1990s. The slasher boom of the ‘80s had waned, and each new year of the ‘90s held ominous signs. 1991 saw the release of last-gasp-for-now sequels for Freddy Krueger and Chucky the killer doll. In 1992, horror maestro John Carpenter released a movie about the invisible man — starring a decidedly non-monstrous Chevy Chase. Looking at the 1993 box office charts, the closest thing to horror in the top 25 is The Nightmare Before Christmas. And in 1994, Sony’s unofficial revival of Universal monsters in a series of big-budget, star-driven productions for adults screeched to a halt when Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein flopped. The stage was set for Scream to revive slashers and horror in general in 1996.
But the real horror revival actually arrived a year earlier, when Seven premiered in 1995. David Fincher’s serial-killer movie starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt as mismatched partner detectives trying to solve a series of murders themed to the seven deadly sins wasn’t really marketed as horror. And fair enough;it also qualifies as a cop movie, a mystery, a thriller, and one of the most profoundly bummed-out films in any of those categories ever released by a major studio. In the burgeoning figurines-of-horror-characters industry, you don’t find cute li’l John Doe likenesses. But with 30 years of hindsight, Seven’s place in the genre seems more obvious.
At the time, serial killer pictures were big. One starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter had the bad luck to release a month and change after Seven under the unflattering title Copycat. Throughout the ‘90s, the likes of Michael Douglas, Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and many more all had a turn at catching these ornately unhinged caricatures. These movies were an outgrowth of ‘80s neo-noir and erotic thrillers, with the emphasis often shifted from sex to violence.
Seven is that, for sure. What little sex is implied in the movie is actually horrific violence. The tone and style of the movie swing it back to the noirs that inspired so many ‘80s and ‘90s thrillers to begin with; the types of 1930s and ‘40s thrillers that shared a German Expressionism influence with early horror. Fincher goes further. Though he doesn’t dramatize many on-screen murders, the precisely curated crime scenes that Detectives Mills (Pitt) and Somerset (Freeman) investigate are uniquely, hauntingly gruesome.
Plenty of serial killer movies have pushed the envelope on violence without necessarily feeling like full-on horror, but Fincher heightens the style of Seven way beyond something like The Bone Collector (or even Silence of the Lambs, often cited as a landmark horror-genre winner of the Best Picture Oscar). The unnamed city where the murders take place is perpetually battered with rain, teeming with shadows, and cluttered with the detritus of various wrecked lives. When Mills seeks respite at home with his lovely wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), their apartment shakes regularly from a passing train. Even in the warmest scenes, nothing in the movie feels clean.
The killer’s apartment, naturally, is far worse. Lit only with cops’ flashlights, a red neon cross, and an assortment of lights (mostly also red) in a makeshift darkroom, it’s a true house of horrors in miniature. During the prolonged tour — the movie spends a full seven minutes in this set — Mills discovers more home-developed photos floating in the killer’s bathtub. They’re images of him, indicating that a shadowy figure the detectives encountered earlier, thought to be one of the tabloid paparazzi, was actually their guy. They were mere feet away from him. That mystery-movie mini-twist is here engineered to provide a chilling, skin-prickling moment of true horror. Of course, there are worse shocks to come, and upon repeat viewings the ultimate fate of Detective Mills feels, if anything, queasier. The shock wears off, and the movie becomes an atmospheric march toward the inevitable, extracting dread from its first real encounter with sunlight as the characters drive out of the city.
Visually, the city and its outskirts in Seven are a step or two up from the hellscape of The Crow. They’re more viscerally frightening, however, because Fincher’s film is just grounded enough to resemble an imitation of life while intentionally refusing to be pinned down as a recognizable location. The movie was shot in Los Angeles, but doesn’t look it. Fincher uses cluttered interiors, brown and greenish tones, and the uncharacteristically gloomy weather to erase any trace of stereotypical Southern California cheer. It’s as if the filmmakers are implying it could be any city you visit, so watch out.
Three decades years later, during a peak of certain news reports and politicians misleadingly characterizing America’s cities as depraved, crimeridden hellholes, Seven’s filmmaking sometimes feels like it’s harboring its own reactionary streak buried next to John Doe’s victims. This, too, makes more sense (or at least feels less directly exploitative) in the context of a horror movie, something more explicitly designed to prey on our worst fears and, sometimes, basest instincts. Thrillers can do this, too, of course; so could any movie, really. But horror has a way of embracing its own manipulations. It feels less cheap when the movie tacitly admits that it’s trying to scare you, rather than fearmongering through friendlier genres.
In a way, to describe Seven as a crime thriller is to diminish it. Not because it transcends the genre; actually, its story isn’t exactly complex, with two stock parts played with gusto by Pitt and especially Freeman. (Has Freeman ever done so much with such a familiar part?) The killer’s grand-design moralizing feels like it’s designed to blow teenagers’ minds, perfect for Kevin Spacey’s showboating as the late-appearing killer. As philosophy, the killer’s philosophizing feels pretty shallow, and the screenplay can’t really come up with its own thematic counter-critique, implied or otherwise. It’s a bleak world, full of sin. As drama, Seven can feel show-offy, even pleased with itself, especially compared to Fincher’s later serial-killer magnum opus Zodiac, a better film on just about every conceivable level. As horror, though, Seven is an experience so unforgettable that it helped bring a whole genre back to squirmy, dread-infused life.
