Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, Wrath. A serial killer on a warped mission who turns his victims' "sins" into the means of their murder. "Seven" (1995) is one of the most acclaimed American films of the 1990s. Starring Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Kevin Spacey, "Seven" is the darkest of films. In it performance, cinematography, sound, and plot combine to create a harrowing account of a world beset by an all-encompassing, irremediable wickedness. Richard Dyer explores in turn the questions of sin, story, structure, seriality, sound, sight and salvation, analyzing how "Seven" both epitomizes and modifies the serial killer genre that is such a feature of recent cinema.

Author Biography

Richard Dyer is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at King's College, London, and Professorial Fellow in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, UK. He has been honoured by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, and Turku and Yale Universities, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His many books include Stars (1979), White (1997), The Culture of Queers (2002), Nino Rota (BFI, 2010) and In the Space of a Song (2012), and he is the author of BFI Film Classics on 'Se7en' (1999), Brief Encounter (2002, 2015) and La Dolce Vita (2017).