Seven Analysis

   When looking at this thriller opening in class, we first listened to the sound, without having seen the accompanying imagery. This enabled us to focus more on what the film might be about, and what is trying to be portrayed just through the sound used.

   When only listening to the sound, I got the feeling of being in a prison from what I thought was someone pulling something along the cell bars, which could have been used to suggest entrapment – a common thriller convention.

   I then seemed to get more of an impression of an unsafe old factory. The sound of clogs moving, a continuous ticking and what I thought was young children screaming, gave me the idea that these children could be playing in this unsafe factory or building, and the fact that the music speeds up as it goes along could be to portray the children running faster, possibly trying to get out.

   We were then shown the very unnatural and seemingly psychotic visuals of the opening. These visuals seemed to relate to the strangeness of the soundtrack, although the images and ideas did not match-up to ones that I had previously described. Although linking my previous thoughts to the current visuals made sense in the fact that this person (although we can only see their hands) seems dangerous to others such as children by what he is doing. The previous sound I presumed to be prison cell bars, could have intentionally been made to seem this way to give the effect that this person is dangerous and should be locked up.

   The sound that I thought was children screaming, could relate to the fact that he crosses out a child’s face as if to show that their life has been scribbled out, or they have been crossed off his accomplish list and are no more. This expresses his danger to children.

   The way that the sound and visuals are very jumpy, distorted and have a schizophrenic/psychotic nature, could be telling us that this is the kind of personality and mind-set of the character we see.

   Just focusing on the visual side of the opening, we can see that the character is making some kind of scrap book that includes images and writing that is very disturbing.

   As we see photo negatives and a flash of red when a photo is being dipped into liquid, we can presume that this character is developing his own photos in his photography dark room. The fact that these disturbing photos that show dead people are his photos, strongly suggests that he was the one to kill them – which makes us as the audience feel very anxious.

   The fact that he is making the book by hand, and we can see every cut, stitch, attention to detail, makes it seem very personal and special to him.

   If he was a psychotic murderer and proud of his conquests, then storing them in this book would more than likely be very important to him.

   The credits even seem to be very constructed, jumpy and distorted, linking us again to what this character we see may be like.

   The images of people used that are focused on, make them appear very small and vulnerable to the largeness of the hands of the character. As we expect to see people full size and their hands as a small part of them, rather than huge hands and a small image or a person, this makes the character look large, powerful and in-control of these people.

   This character who is likely to be a psychotic serial killer and his victims that we have seen him record in his book are typical thriller characters.

   The colours used throughout are very dark and mysterious, hinting us to this character’s dark ways and thoughts possibly. The colour red is used a few times also. As well as showing that the picture is being developed in the photography dark room with a safe-light on, this also gives the ideas of death/blood/pain and other associations like this that we make with the colour red.