Se7en: Horror is having a moment. Again.

Screenwriting Tricks for Authors

Last week we had the talk: we have half the year left to write a book. Of course you always have the next six months to finish a book! But there is something profoundly motivational and effective about setting the end of a year as your finish line.

I hope some of you launched into the first assignment of that post and have chosen and even maybe viewed a movie that will be your personal textbook of story structure.

Another Substacker here, author Jade Eby, chose Andrew Kevin Walker/David Fincher’s horror classic Se7en.

As I admitted to her, I have a love/hate relationship with this film. It is so unremittingly brutal that it’s hard to recommend.

I emphatically do not write torture, and I don’t read or watch it either. While Se7en doesn’t quite put the torture on the screen, it details it pretty graphically. Worse, the film was so successful it spawned hundreds of much less intelligent and even uglier knock offs - and pumped life into a crime subgenre I really despise, the pattern serial killer story. More on which in this footnote - ¹

However. We’re talking about how to elevate our writing by using the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure of film, and Se7en is one of the clearest examples available. It takes its premise of a serial killer choosing a set of victims based on the Seven Deadly Sins and slots that perfectly into the Eight-Sequence pattern, each crime scene constituting a SETPIECE. It also helpfully designates its sequences with TITLE CARDS of the seven days of the week.

• More on SETPIECES

• More on ACT & SEQUENCE BRIDGES

If crime or horror is at all your genre, there’s probably no better structural example of it besides Silence of the Lambs.

(You may even have watched it again recently, as it was re-released theatrically this year for its 30th anniversary.)

Also - horror is having a moment in film and books. I was at the Crime Writers Association awards dinner last week (an actually fun awards dinner, which doesn’t happen all that often!) and the publishers I spoke with confirmed it. I spent a surprising amount of time in conversations about the genre. (The CWA is a British organization, but the publishers I was speaking with were equally US and UK based).

I’m not saying that you should all run out and write horror, because trying to chase the market like that is never a good idea. It moves too fast. BUT - if you have been floundering for the story of your next book, and you already have an abandoned draft squirreled away somewhere or a horror idea already occupying your head, that might be information that’s of use to you!

The conventional wisdom is that in horrific times, people want light and frothy entertainment. I don’t think that’s true - and I’m old enough to have seen this trend toward horror and the paranormal surface with a vengeance in previous troubling, violent, authoritarian white-male-dominated times.

I completely understand why some people would not want any more horror on top of what we’re currently living on a daily basis. But there are a lot of us who find ourselves turning to fictional horror in the midst of real-life horror. It can be strangely validating and cathartic to give in to the overwhelmingness of that particular feeling.

Also I always highly recommend looking at the structure of films in different genres from your own to absorb that this is the basic structure of ALL genres!

But if you’re NOT one of us darker-leaning people, you can use any number of films in the romance or other genres to learn the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence structure just as effectively.

Try this breakdown of The Holiday, or any one of the ten full breakdowns of romances in various subgenres in Writing Love. Breakdowns in other genres linked here!

So this week, I’ll do a few introductory notes about Se7en, and I’ll post a full list of Sequence and Act Climaxes, with times, notes, etc. next week! But this week I’d really like those of you playing along at home to watch the first half hour or so of the movie or the full film if you’re so inspired, and note these things for yourself, for practice:

• The designation of sequences by title cards of the days of the week

• The start and end times and length in minutes of each sequence

• The way the crime scenes serve as SETPIECES (and note the numerous other setpieces of the film).

• The skillful and effective CONTRASTING of the chalk and cheese characters of Somerset and Mills that provides most if not all of the humor of this otherwise unrelentingly dark story.

• Also note the overwhelming sense of dread, expertly set up very early in the film. It’s a brilliant example of establishing HOPE, FEAR and STAKES, which I will talk more about next week.

As always, I’m happy to talk about films you choose in other genres as well.

PREMISE:

A veteran and a rookie police detective hunt a serial killer who bases his horrific crimes on the seven deadly sins.

GENRE:
Horror/crime. Why is it horror when there’s nothing supernatural in it? Because film, TV and books have embraced serial killers as actual monsters, sort of replacing the Mummy in the pantheon of fictional monsters. I’ve written about how this came about in my introduction to the breakdown of Silence of the Lambs.

Fincher also uses many elements of Neo-Noir - the late 80’s-90’s went for Neo Noir in a huge way (think Fatal Attraction, Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, LA Confidential). Setting the action of this story not in the present but in some nourish mythical parallel time dimension was a canny stylistic and tonal choice to pull off a completely unrealistic plot.

PROTAGONIST:

You can make a very strong argument that this is a DUAL PROTAGONIST story, and I wouldn’t disagree with you. It’s a fine movie to look at for how to structure a dual protagonist story.

But for me, the gravitas and sheer gravitational force of Morgan Freeman as Somerset makes him the real protagonist, and most of the film is from his POV. I am also influenced by the original scripts (there were two versions) - which were much more clearly led by Somerset. In fact, there was a heightened sense of danger and dread to the scripts because Somerset spiraled through all of the Seven Deadly Sins himself, in each of the sequences — which had the electrifying effect of putting an ever-growing target on his back. That was a layer that was lost in the film, for various reasons having to do with the casting of Morgan Freeman. In the scripts there was a strong subplot of a potential romance between Tracy and Somerset, which you might say was cut because of the difference in Paltrow and Freeman’s ages. That is, you might say that — if you were naive and completely blind to the way Hollywood works.

But you can also argue that cutting that subplot strengthened the film in other ways. And there’s no question that both Freeman and Pitt did career-highlight work in the movie.

And no matter what movie you choose to focus on, here’s why to do that:

• Review the Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure

- Alex

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• Stealing Hollywood ebook, $3.99, also available as print workbook

• Writing Love ebook, $2.99

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All material © Alexandra Sokoloff, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors

1. The much overused Pattern Serial Killer plot is based on a misreading of the profiling methods of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. The classic textbook of the then-BSU, Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives, analyzes the “signature” of serial predators - evidence of a ritual that is unique to the offender. Novelists and filmmakers immediately jumped on the idea of signature as meaning some kind of artistic flair to a crime scene.

In reality, serial killers are rapists who graduate to murder. They do not choose victims based on the seven deadly sins, or arrange victims in tableaux of classic paintings, or leave poems at their crime scenes for the detectives to follow. My friend and colleague Mark Billingham has posed the question at crime writing conventions: “Are we as authors going to keep churning out pattern serial killer novels or are we going to do the work to write about actual crimes?” I couldn’t agree more.