8 Movies With Seriously Insane Details You Didn't Notice

5. Somebody Actually Wrote Out All Those John Doe Diaries - Se7en (1995)

Se7en is one of the best movies of the '90s, and arguably David "Serial Killer" Fincher's most accomplished film. Set over the course of a week, the plot concerns two detectives, one Brad Pitt, the other Morgan Freeman, as they attempt to track down a batshit crazy serial killer (known only by the genericism "John Doe") who is subjecting his victims to horrific deaths inspired by the seven deadly sins.

At one point in the movie, Pitt and Freeman break into the madman's apartment, where they discover that he has panache for writing down his thoughts in a diary. And the man has lots and lots of diaries. Hundreds of them, even. Enter John Sable, the production designer who David Fincher commissioned to construct John Doe's mind in paper form. That's to say, he asked Sable to create the props for Doe's scattered notes.

To really capture Doe's madness, Sable apparently went to extreme lengths himself: he bought $1500 worth of old journals, which he proceeded to rip to pieces, sew back together, and attach weird pictures of limbs and mutilated bodies to. Sable then wrote like it was going out of style. Like, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words, spread across thousands and thousands of pages. He filled notebook after notebook with John Doe's scrawl, because that's what a good production designer does.

Eventually this stuff was scattered around Doe's apartment, and you can just glimpse some of it in the background of a few scenes, not to mention in the movie's iconic opening credit sequence. Most of Sable's is purely for set dressing, as it's generally too small to actually read. Sure, it could have just been printed out and faked, but where's the fun in that when you could have someone fake the ramblings of a serial killer instead?