One of the Most Disturbing Movies of the ’90s is Climbing The HBO Max Charts
I came of age as a horror fan in the early 2000s, which meant that when I hit up my local video store, the frightening and disturbing films of the ’90s were on prominent display. It started with a TV cut of Scream on my tiny bedroom TV, and then progressed to the rest of the horror and horror-adjacent mainstream of the era.
Fortunately, I had a few friends who were into the same stuff, and they’d often direct me toward must-see movies from the period. That’s how I discovered what’s now a classic, a rebound movie for director David Fincher that gained infamy for its bleak ending and eventually became one of the most celebrated psychological thrillers of the 1990s. Now, as we head into the Halloween season, that film is climbing the charts on HBO Max, just in time for its 30th anniversary.
Like The Silence of the Lambs before it, Seven (or Se7en, if you’re nasty) merges the narrative beats of a police procedural with the visual language of horror cinema to create something unforgettable. Andrew Kevin Walker’s now-legendary script pairs an experienced, cool-headed detective (Morgan Freeman) with a young, fiery new man on the beat (Brad Pitt) as they investigate a new serial killer with a very specific modus operandi. The film is called Seven because this killer, who I won’t reveal here, is choosing victims and staging elaborate crime scenes based on the Seven Deadly Sins of religious literature.
The killer’s chosen theme, combined with elaborately staged crime scenes, is what really drives the horror home. Gluttons are punished by force feeding, vain people through mutilations,and greedy people through extracting literal pounds of flesh. Each and every death scene is simultaneously gruesome and strangely beautiful, thanks to Fincher’s direction, suggesting later crime-horror hybrids like Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal. It’s all horrific, but the whodunit mystery of it all propels the film forward at such a speed that you can’t look away, and you don’t want to.
But Seven is perhaps still best known for its ending, which resolves the mystery and yet leaves an ambiguous, terrifying note hanging in the air. David Fincher fought for this ending, and as a result, it remains one of the most infamous of the period. It’s an ending that’s been memed, debated, and discussed for three decades, including right here on Dread Central, but I’m still not going to spoil it for you. I had the pleasure of going into Seven completely blind back in the day, having not just no idea what was at the end, but what I’d seen along the way. In my early horror fandom, it was one of those movies people passed around on DVD, initiating everyone into the club of people who knew what lurked in its darkness.
It’s been 30 years, but I’m betting there are plenty of people still out there who have no idea what’s about to hit them when they press play on this thing. If that’s you, do me a favor: Go to HBO Max right now and watch Seven, preserve that new experience while you can.
Categorized: News
