hind. This cat-and-mouse game is made explicit in both films, and in each film the killer participates directly in the process by contacting the police, taunting them, leaving them clues intending that they will follow them so he can play with their minds and direct their actions as if they were puppets. Such games of power and control are common in this sort of story. The police in real life rarely have contact with the serial killers of this world, the Zodiac killer in San Francisco and the Unabomber perhaps being exceptions, but the police in movies nearly always become pawns in a game they do not understand when they are faced with a serial killer.
The serial killer has in fact become the target of choice for movie police departments and occur with greater frequency than they do in real life. It is clear that the audience feels a particular fear of such killers because there seems to be no understandable reason for such crimes. The twisted mind of a Jeffrey Dahmer fascinates the public even as they shrink back from the crimes committed. The dual response the audience has to this sort of criminal in films was apparent a few years ago with the great success of the film The Silence of the Lambs, a film in which the psychotic killer was given a particular human face in the form of Anthony Hopkins, more Machiavellian than most movie criminals and than any real criminal is likely to be.
Yet the criminals and the way they are treated in these two films differ greatly in spite of their similarities, and they do so in a way that points out another duality in art and in films today. Seven really harks back to an earlier time, an earlier view of the origins of crime, and an earlier artistic aesthetic as well. Seven is a film based on a religious view of good against evil, with true
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