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Christopher Sharrett
Richard Dyer. London: British Film Institute, 1999, 88 pp. $12.95 (paperback).
Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and David Fincher's Seven (1995) became pivotal films of the 90s for their close merger of the crime and horror genres, their bleak visions that seemed much in keeping with that decade's rampant apocalypticism, and the privileged position they gave to the cinema of serial murder, propelling the predictable ludicrous rip-offs (Kiss the Girls, Fallen, The Cell, The Bone Collector, et al.). While it can be argued rather easily that the major ideas of both films were accomplished much more handily in Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) and John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), there is no denying the impact of Silence and Seven. The films have much in common: both are star vehicles, both were heavily promoted by their respective studios, both have many of the vices recurrent in the mainstream genre cinema (notably an outrageous homophobia, especiallypronounced in Silence of the Lambs). In retrospect, Seven seems the superior work, because it is free of scenery chewing--can anyone take seriously Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter?--and much more relentless and uncompromised in pursuing its singularly dark worldview.
As Richard Dyer notes in his monograph on the film (part of BFI's Modern Classics series), Seven describes a rather medieval notion...