10 "Gory" Movie Moments (That Didn't Show As Much As You Think)
6. What's In The Box? (Se7en -1995)
Se7en is a detective thriller that deals with a particularly horrific series of crimes.
The film’s most grisly moments are the discovery of the crime scenes. Victims are bloated from food or emaciated from starvation. Domestic spaces are splattered in blood. The sadistic circumstances behind these murders are its true horror.
Only one killing occurs onscreen, shot from a distance. Killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) is murdered by Mills (Brad Pitt) after Mills discovers his wife’s (Gwenyth Paltrow) severed head in a cardboard box.
We are never shown the head, but the reaction of Somerset (Morgan Freeman) after carefully opening the box tells the awful story. Director David Fincher uses a trademark trick by flashing a still of (an alive) Paltrow for a single frame, whilst an anguished Mills points a gun at Doe.
This subliminal flash of the wife becomes the unseen head, filling in the negative space of the open box. Instead, our brains conjure a gruesome image that we are never actually shown.