Two recent films that have certain similarities in subject matter are Seven and Copycat, both of which deal with the hunt for a serial killer and both of which involve a sort of Hitchcockian borrowing in terms of the deliberate use of one of his favorite devices, the transference of guilt. The two films have certain other similarities to one another--each presents the usual pairing of a veteran police detective with a junior officer, each involves a serial killer who taunts the police and in effect dares them to catch him, each indicates the darkness at the heart of the killer, and each indulges in a certain amount of gore and in some of the trappings of the horror movie. In other respects, though, the films are quite different, with Seven being much the darker vision and the more daring treatment while Copycat is much more a clear star vehicle for two women and is packaged in a much slicker format. Each depends for its existence, however, on the fact that there is already a long-established sub-genre consisting of this type of film, and many of the scenes, characters, situations, and moods of both films come from territory mined many times before. Each film tries both to play on the expectations of its genre while at the same time undercutting them somewhat in order to take a fresh approach, or at least to convey the idea that something fresh is taking place. The films achieve different levels of success.
A semiotic critic would find clear and direct relations between certain sequences and scenes in each film, reflecting the generic elements that signal a relationship to a genre, symbols linking these films to aspects of society, and repeated icons expressing certain aesthetic ideas. The primary elements in each film are the police on the one side and the serial killer on the other, with the latter leaving a trail of bodies and the former trying to develop a profile of the killer and to decode the symbolic clues he leaves be...