Dave’s Favorite Horror Movies: #2 – Seven [VIDEO]

In the run-up to Halloween, I thought I’d lay out my favorite horror movies of all time. Now, I have a couple of changes from previous lists.

First, I no longer call this a list of the five scariest movies of all time because they’re excellent films and I’ve watched them a number of times for THAT reason. So they don’t “scare” me anymore. But I deeply appreciate how they CAN scare someone. Naturally, I’d love to see them all again as if I were watching them for the first time, but that’s not happening.

Second, there are a couple of movies in my list that some might not regard as “horror” films. One is also a science fiction movie. Another could legitimately be called a crime drama. Well, actually, three others could be. But, they are also all, in my opinion, horror movies.

Here now is the first runner-up. At #2, I present Seven!

This is the one that's most often labeled as a "crime drama" rather than a "horror movie." Guess what? It's both! It's a sofa AND a bed!

It's a FREAK show is what it is.

Seven has four major characters--Detective William Somerset, played by Morgan Freeman; Detective David Mills, played by Brad Pitt, serial killer John Doe (not telling you the actor's name in case you haven't seen it, 'cause it's a surprise), and...an unnamed city where it always rains.

We never know its name, but it's a bleak metropolis whose citizens have more or less become accustomed to heinous violence. It's a city where a psychopath, known only as John Doe, can go unnoticed while devoting a great deal of time to torturing a morbidly obese man or to spending an entire weekend hiding inside a law firm just so he can kill a lawyer.

And despite how they sound, these are not simple crimes.

They are elaborate and very deliberate and, on their face, completely unrelated. But the murders are part of John Doe's extravagant scheme to kill people he believes have committed any of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Seven is not about vigilante justice. It is a wicked and disturbing mindgame that plows, full-throttle, toward an unprecedented finale that's initiated long before the film ends. I had never seen anything like it in my lifetime. And I still haven't.

And that's just as well.

No one could re-create what director David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network) created 17 years ago. No one should ever try.