Two serial killer movies I thought would be horror movies

You might be scoffing at the distinction I'm making in that subject line, but you shouldn't be.

Serial killers may appear in horror movies, and frequently do. But not all movies featuring serial killers are horror movies, and in fact, many are not. 

Is Se7en a horror movie? Of course it isn't. It has horrific elements to it, and it may disturb you more than most horror movies, but it isn't scary. Or if it is scary, it's scary more for making you consider the depravity of which human beings are capable, not scary in a "boo!" sort of way.

Se7en is a serial killer movie, which means it focuses more on the people solving those crimes, not the victims of those crimes. I suppose the more general, overarching genre would be "crime movie."

Which is a fine kind of movie, if a little played out. It's just not the type of movie I was expecting when I saw the double feature of MaXXXine and Longlegs on Thursday night.

MaXXXine, the far (far) better of the two movies, might have rightly expected to adhere more to the conventions of horror as a result of the two movies that preceded it in Ti West's apparently now-completed trilogy. X is probably most correctly described as a slasher movie, given that it has an unfathomable killer as its adversary, whereas Pearl blurs the lines a bit more, to its great benefit. It's a killer origin story, but it's more of a pastoral period piece that morphs into a horror movie over the course of its running time. Anyway, both are characterised as horror on IMDB.

As is MaXXXine, but should it be? The distinctions are interesting here. X gets the genre designations of horror, mystery and thriller. I'm not sure about "mystery" there, but okay. Pearl, as an indication of its more complex tone, gets drama, horror and thriller. MaXXXine gets crime and horror, and it's the crime designation that saps some of the value of the horror designation.

I'd argue that the difference between different sorts of serial killer movies is whether there are detectives intimately involved. There are detectives intimately involved in MaXXXine, so intimately involved that they are played by A-list, or close to A-list, actors in Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale. The story is not told from their perspective, and we don't witness their activities outside of their interactions with the protagonist, but they keep popping up throughout the story, interrogating our main character and trying to get her to help them solve a series of murders. It's enough to give the film a major whiff of the serial killer movie rather than the horror movie, an impression strengthened by the use of a number of serial killer movie cliches, like coroners examining bodies, and pentagrams burned into the flesh of victims.

Longlegs, an absolute piece of shit, goes full serial killer movie, though it thinks it is a horror, which is all the more embarrassing.

Before I go off ripping Longlegs a new asshole, I want to establish two things:

1) I still dearly love a horror movie by the director of Longlegs and consider it to be one of the best horror movies of the 21st century. I adore Osgood Perkins' The Blackcoat's Daughter. I just want to say that to give some context to the things I'm about to say.

2) More context: Apparently, I and another friend I've spoken to about Longlegs are in the minority about this movie. Apparently, most people really like it. I have no idea why that is. But if you must take what I'm saying with that grain of salt, take it.

Perkins' career has been composed of prestige horror, which has included Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, in addition to Blackcoat's Daughter. So we would naturally expect that his new movie would also be prestige horror.

But this movie isn't two minutes old before it starts dumping on us the worst and most embarrassing cliches of 1990s serial killer movies. I could name them but it would get exhausting. Never mind, I will:

1) The brilliant but closed off and socially inept female FBI agent.

2) The serial killer who has a personal relationship with that FBI agent.

3) The serial killer who communicates with that FBI agent through encoded messages left at murder scenes, where only the FBI agent can crack the code (and does so suspiciously easily).

4) Indications of devil worship and other religious themes.

5) Murders that occur according to some precise alignments of dates, which form a shape only when those dates are viewed in exactly that way. 

6) Other stupid numerology.

7) An older FBI sidekick for our main character whose role is to be supportive but also to throw cold water on most of our main character's hunches.

8) And oh yeah, hunches that suggest some sort of supernatural ability by our main character.

9) Multiple bits of serial killer iconography used randomly and in seeming contradiction with one another.

10) Appearances of the serial killer "in the wild" (like the time spent with Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs) that are meant to make him more disturbing, but in this case, do not.

Yes, Nicolas Cage as the title character (not a spoiler, it's revealed in the opening credits) is not scary at all in this movie. 

I don't want to get into all the ways Longlegs fails as a movie -- as a horror, as a serial killer movie, as any movie at all. I'm saving that for my review, which will be posted in a couple days and which you'll be able to see to the right at that time. (The MaXXXine review is already there. But if you're reading this a lot later, you can click to it here.) 

For the purposes of this particular piece, let's just say that Perkins' few gestures toward actual horror movie content are very limp by his previous standards, and are mostly undone by the trappings of the serial killer movie.

So I left this double feature at the Sun in Yarraville feeling significantly annoyed by the baits and switches to which I was subjected, at least marginally liking the first movie. But since MaXXXine is much better in its first half and Longlegs is good in no half, that left me without about three hours of disappointing movie to end my night.

A serial killer of my buzz, indeed. 

Capitulating to Se7en

That's right, Se7en.

Not Seven.

For years I've been opposed to what I considered to be a cutesy way of writing the title for David Fincher's 1995 film. Saddled with the compulsion to read it as it is written, I have satirically read the title as "Sezzen" when it's written this way, since the 7 sort of resembles a Z. (Just one Z, but when typographically representing a sound, two Z's give it a more traditional word structure.)

It took finally seeing the movie again on Friday to make me -- still reluctantly -- change my mind.

You will note in my Most Recently Revisited section on the right side of this blog that I now write the title as Se7en. I'm about to tell you why.

Whenever I've wondered the correct way to type a title -- usually, like if it uses the word "and" or an ampersand -- I always defer to how the title appears in the actual film itself. I suppose there's a film or two out there where the title never appears, so I guess in that case I just have to go with my gut, or with how other publications have chosen to write it.

David Fincher's movie gets one of two treatments, depending on the decision of individual publications. This poster is a good example of the attendant schizophrenia, as it includes both versions. There are those, like me, who have found Se7en to be a gimmicky and silly way to write the title, and have opted for Seven. And then there are those who just write the title as it appears in the film.

It appears in the film, of course, as Se7en. So this is now the means of typographic representation I will also favor.

I'm not happy about it. I can tell you that much. But one distinct advantage is that it more immediately communicates what movie you're talking about to a reader. Not that there are a lot of other prominent films named Seven, though I suppose there are some. It does allow you to mention the movie entirely out of the context of talking about films, and the reader will immediately understand you are referencing not only a film, but this specific film. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain already enjoy this advantage -- now Se7en does too.

Since I am nothing if not anal retentive, I have now gone through my various lists in which Se7en appears -- films I've seen in 1995, my total list of films, etc. -- and changed the spelling. If I were even more anal, I'd probably try to seek out references on this blog and update them too. But there's no tag associated with the movie, meaning if I've ever discussed it it's only been in passing. And just searching the blog for the word "seven" will get me nowhere.

As for the film itself, I enjoyed watching it again for the first time in at least 15 years, though I didn't particularly glean new insight from it. I did have a couple things I wanted to point out, though, and they all relate to the way the film belies the typical detective film. In fact, in at least three different ways I can think of, Se7en undermines the intelligence of its detectives rather than privileging it.

A heart, not a brain

In the very opening investigation of a crime scene, in which we meet detective Will Somerset (Morgan Freeman), there's a throwaway moment that never pays itself off later in the film. (Or if it does, I missed it.) Somerset asks one of the other cops where the children are, as he notices children's drawings on the refrigerator of some kind of crime of passion that has left a husband or wife dead. (Two days later, I already can't remember which, and the Wikipedia plot synopsis does not specify.)

The other cop scoffs and says it's a dumb question.

In a typical detective movie, which immediately wants to establish that our detective is smarter than the others, this "dumb question" ends up proving immediately prophetic. In a typical detective movie, what the others thought was a ridiculous possibility -- that a child would still be cowering somewhere in this apartment where one of his or her parents was murdered -- would prove to be true.

In Se7en, it's not true. There is no child on the scene. And so Somerset's question would seem to be entirely without merit, except that it has a different function: It proves he has a heart. In a city full of corruption, violence, brutality and evil, his heart distinguishes him more than his brain. Especially when the other detective talks about how worrying about where the children might be is not part of their job.

Of course, we see plenty of examples of Somerset's brain later on -- but Se7en doesn't worry that we won't trust his smarts. It worries that we might not know he has a heart, and that's the most important thing to establish with him.

Street smarts, not a brain

One way Somerset's smarts are proven is not only that he notices details, like the children's drawings on the refrigerator, but that he has a deep understanding of classic literature, one that actually contributes to the cracking of cases from time to time.

That does not describe his new partner, David Mills (Brad Pitt).

Mills is a hot shot in his own right, but he's not an intellectual. He'd like to emulate the research-intensive approach of someone like Somerset, as it has obviously gotten results, but he just can't sit there reading Milton and Chaucer.

So instead he gets a beat cop to buy him Cliff's Notes for the books Somerset has told him to look at.

When Somerset later expresses surprise that Mills gets a reference from one of these books, meaning he read them, Mills says something under his breath like "sort of" or "mostly" before continuing on. It's one of the film's few attempts at humor, and it really lands.

Interestingly, Mills' shrewdness is also undermined when he asks a beat cop if they checked for a pulse on the guy whose face is found sunk into a bowl of spaghetti. It seems like a dumb question at the time, and Mills explains that he's seen corpses who weren't corpses before -- though when Somerset asks him why he was hammering home the point, he can't really explain why, which gives an indication of how green he is, how much he does things without thinking and on instinct.

This one does pay itself off later, however, when they arrive at the home of the child molester who has been starved over the course of a year, and the apparent corpse does gasp out a helpless breath.

Luck, not a brain

Despite all the clues they uncover that do in fact lead them to John Doe, Doe still bests them and escapes from the scene of his potential arrest. And the only reason they do eventually take him into custody is because he walks into the police station, covered in blood, and surrenders himself. (In fact, this sight is so apparently commonplace, and people are so numb to it, that he actually has to scream "Detective!" to get anyone's attention despite his ghastly appearance.)

So in the end -- unlike other detective movies -- it's just dumb luck, or rather, the nefarious scheming of the criminal himself, that ends up getting the criminal caught.

So yeah, I guess I did glean some new insight from Se7en after all -- and not just on the "correct" spelling of its title.