YEAR 1994 directed by john waters

STARRING kathleen turner, ricki lake, matthew lillard

Qs: 7.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:14:49.  Beverly’s first victim is her son Chip’s math teacher, Mr. Stubbins.  Condemning his fascination with horror films and his general smug attitude weren’t enough, but when he walked out of the building chewing gum, that was the last straw.  Beverly floors it and nails him, his body flying over the car and landing in the parking lot but not before leaving a bloody smudge on the windshield.  Not done, she flips it in reverse and backs over his body again before calmly driving away.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:15:36.  Chip, Birdie and Scotty are watching none other than Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast, mentioned at its appropriate place on the site.  The particular scene in question involves a case of “man got your tongue?”  After Scotty and Birdie leave, Beverly asks if she can rewind to the part where he pulls a woman’s heart out.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:34:19.  Beverly sees Carl, the boy who was supposed to go out with Misty but stood her up to go out on another date altogether.  She decides to borrow Rosemary’s fire poker and take it to him personally.  Sneaking up behind him while he’s relieving himself, she jams the poker in his back and yanks it back out, an organ of some kind clinging to it.  Jiggling it around, trying to get it loose, Beverly resorts to hand-picking the meat off of the poker and dropping it next to him before strolling out of the crime scene, carrying the murder weapon in plain sight.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:38:20.  The gang watches a clip with a decapitation and general ax violence from Strait Jacket, 1964.

N       0:46:40.  Hiding in the closet, Beverly drives a pair of scissors into Mrs. Sterner’s abdomen while a rat chews on her ankle.  Her husband Ralph runs to the scene – and then runs away as Beverly flings the scissors after him.  They miss and stick in the wall, so she resorts to heavier measures.  She unplugs and loosens the air conditioning unit in their bedroom window and drops it from the second floor on his head while he screams for someone to call the police.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:56:50.  Chip rushes into the video store and flicks on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, [O], 1974.

N       1:01:08.  Beverly teaches Ms. Jenson the penalty for not rewinding her videocassettes.  Armed with a leg of lamb, she beats Ms. Jenson to death, spattering the TV screen with red.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:07:46.  Unfortunately for Scotty, he happened to watch Beverly in action while she clubbed Ms. Jenson.  Armed with the former’s knife, she chases Scotty to Hammerjack’s where he sings his swan song onstage.  One of the band members jabs him in the gut with her electric guitar only a few seconds before Beverly cuts down a lighting rig that lands directly on his head.  While the authorities (and her family) pull up outside, she proceeds, with a lighter and a can of hairspray, to set Scotty aflame.  The band plays on – in fact, they not only continue to play while the audience cheers (her family and the police horrified), but they encourage it.  As Scotty burns, the lead singer loads up with a mouthful of liquor and spits it out on their ignited guest, worsening his already bad situation.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:28:00.  Beverly beats Patricia Hearst to death with a phone for the mortal sin of wearing white (shoes) after Labor Day.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 2000 directed by daniel minahan

STARRING brooke smith, glenn fitzgerald, marylouise burke

Qs: 6.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:12:42.  A patient is rolled into the hospital where Connie is a nurse.  He’s suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and an unclear sort of head trauma leaving him unconscious and on the brink of death, which he soon passes.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:30:24.  In a clip from an episode of a past Series, Dawn corners a woman in a glass elevator and slits her throat.  Blood spurts from the wound as she slowly falls to the floor, gasping.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:51:09.  In a shopping mall, Franklin appears from behind the Wicks n’ Sticks stand and beats Lindsey to death with his cane, hitting her twice across the face and beating her several more times once on the ground.  She’s unable to defend herself because in her panic of not expecting him to be anywhere nearby she forgets how to and that she has to disengage the safety on the 9mm before she can fire it.  In the same breath, Connie, from elsewhere on the second floor, shoots him twice in the chest before running off, fleeing Dawn’s fire.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:57:40.  Breaking into Connie’s but forced into a standstill situation when she threatens to give birth right then and there, Dawn gets up on the dining room table and, with Connie’s cooperation on the part of the innocent, unwilling participant Dawn’s carrying around, helps her deliver.  The scene resembles exactly what you would expect from an impromptu operating room and a human pregnancy situation: blood everywhere and a life on the line.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:08:30.  Recuperating from the delivery and her hospital stay, Dawn hears a shot from somewhere down the hall.  Tracking the source of the sound, she finds Jeff in a panic, having shot and killed Connie, leaving her bleeding to death under the sheets.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:20:29.  In a recreation of the events we see Connie and Jeff forced into an odd position before an audience full of moviegoers.  The tense final conflict doesn’t end like one would think, even after the bloody battle that would seem to have ended it all.  SR: SSSSS

N       If you liked the gritty, uncompromising realism of Series 7, I strongly urge you to consider, unless of course you’ve seen it already, another film listed in this work: The Last Horror Movie.  Filmed in a comparable style of freehand camerawork and unscripted reality with bold, harsh moves and real and deep questions about life, death and what it is to be psychotic, it tracks Max, a wedding photographer, both on the job and off the clock when he moonlights as a serial killer.

YEAR 2001 directed by brad anderson

STARRING david caruso, steven gevedon, paul guilfoyle

Qs: 4.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       1:01:30.  Gordon pours hydrogen peroxide on the nasty burn on his leg.  If you’ve used it for even a paper cut, magnify it to the size of your thigh and you’ll understand why saliva was pouring from his screaming mouth.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:26:37.  Large pools of blood don’t usually mean good things.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:27:02.  You would think that purging a building of its hazardous building materials would be relatively simple.  Session 9 however shows that even the most unassuming episodes can turn to crap in the blink of an eye.  Earlier, Phil found Hank, only not in a good way – rocking in a secluded hole, muttering the same thing he did to Jeff: “what are you doing here?”  It’s only now that we find out not only what the red stuff he smeared on the window was, but everything about his behavior.  Phil instructs Gordon to wake up and take a good, long look at Hank who lay before them, wrapped in plastic.  Gordon removes his sunglasses and finds the lobotomy instrument Mike held on Jeff earlier when he laid out how to use it rammed in the corner of his right eye, dried blood around the site.  When their extra set of hands arrives, Gordon gets him in a headlock, removes the instrument from Hank’s head (which lifts along with it until it pulls free) and jams it in his left eye.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:31:15.  The film reaches a shattering revelation and a horrifying conclusion that results in the deaths of just about everyone, red streaked and pooled all around their lifeless bodies.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1995 directed by david fincher

STARRING brad pitt, morgan freeman, gweneth paltrow

Qs: 7 (coincidence, I promise).  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:00:58.  Here we see a passion crime writ large.  A man (screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker) lying facedown in his apartment doesn’t have a back to his head anymore and he lay not simply on the hardwood floor but in a large pool of rich, dark blood.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:13:25.  At 0:09:30 we saw from the back one of the biggest men around.  At least three times the width of either Det. Somerset or Mills, the unnamed soul was the first victim of our SE7EN killer, John Doe.  At the mark we’re taken into the autopsy room where work is being done on gluttony.  There isn’t a square inch on the man’s body that isn’t bulging in one direction or another, his veins everywhere a thick blue and considerably close to the surface and there are stitches along the classic Y-incision on the chest.  As the doctor goes through what he found about the man and the specific cause of death.  Soon we get a wide shot that very literally puts in perspective the size and shape of the man.  The doctor then holds up a bloody organ in a clear bag and asks the detectives to look at how big it was.  It was the man’s stomach, easily the size of a beach ball, roughly 18 inches across.  Det. Somerset then summarizes the findings as to the cause of death.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:19:05.  Here we’re shown a wide shot in which Det. Mills is standing between a large, amorphous bloodstain on the carpet and greed written in thick bloody letters.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:37:52.  Somerset and Mills look over B & W crime scene photos of Eli Gould, the greed victim.  The first shows him from behind, hunched over, a blood pool visible to both sides.  In the second, amidst the blood, was a scale on one side of which really was a pound of flesh that, evidently, the man had to cut off himself.  The fourth photo shows him from the side and we see what it was he was hunched over – a stack of seven (imagine that) books down the sides of which he had been bleeding for some time.  His abdominal region is covered in blood that has run down his legs and into the carpet.  Many more photographs follow of numerous other angles of the scene.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:52:30.  The sequence with Victor, the sloth victim, is nothing short of simply horrifying on a visual level, a conceptual and a visceral.  S.W.A.T. officers bursting into his apartment, Somerset and Mills in tow, the men encounter several nondescript rooms before coming to one that must have over a hundred air freshener trees hanging from its ceiling.  From there, they have a sight line to their quarry, Victor himself.  Ordering him to get up and do it now, the men start to make their way into the room which also has hundreds of air fresheners not only hung from the ceiling but littered all over the floor.  Whisking the sheet off of the covered figure, even the seasoned S.W.A.T. officers are taken by total surprise on this one.  Victor is completely emaciated, bleeding sores of all kinds all over his skin, no hand on his left arm.  One officer doubts it’s even a real person.  Mills finds in a box by the bed a stack of photographs, evidently a succession of images taken at the rate of one a day, visually tracking the degeneration of Victor’s body.  Being the sloth victim, he was tied to a bed, permanently, kept alive by inconceivably tedious means of intravenous feeding and tubes to facilitate (or even make possible) certain other delicate functions.  At 0:53:43 we’re shown a close-up on Victor’s face.  The skin around and including his lips have drawn away from his teeth and all but dried out, turning a ghostly pale white.  His jaw hangs open and you can see plainly the location of absolutely every bone in his body, which, I would think, couldn’t have weighed much more than the bones themselves.  The scene rounds out with a titanic jolting shock that the man is, in a way only God can understand, still alive.  He coughs and wheezes while his head whips rapidly back and forth, his eyes never closing, blinking or moving inside the skull.  The doctor at the hospital to which he was taken to agreed that a year of immobility makes sense with the breakdown of his musculature and the wild assortment of chemicals in his system injected over the course of the incarceration to fight off infections from bedsores and generally keep him ticking.  When the detectives ask if he tried to communicate at all, the doctor informs them that if his brain didn’t have the consistency and intellectual capacity of oatmeal that he couldn’t have talked had he wanted to – he bit off his tongue a while since.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:33:08.  Here we walk into the bathroom of pride.  Blood drips from the sink into puddles on the floor and bloody items of some kind fill the bathtub.  Spots on the floor lead into the bedroom wherein we find the body of a woman laid out on white sheets, white pillowcases on probably white pillows under her head around which is quite a bit of red.  A large picture of what the woman looked like before John Doe got to her acts as a headboard to the scene.  As the investigation continues, it appears John sliced the woman up quite badly, the worst of which was cutting off her nose, before gluing a bottle of sleeping pills to one hand and a phone to the other.  She could call for help and live, but be disfigured, or end it all right there.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:33:48.  John Doe, in all his bloody fingerprint-less glory, walks right into the police station, informing the detectives that it was he they were looking for.  SR: SSSSS

YEAR 1982 directed by lucio fulci

STARRING catriona maccoll, david warbeck, sarah keller

Qs: 16.  AR: SSSSSSSSSS

N       0:03:35.  In a relatively modern-day (1927) witch hunt (warlock hunt) the accused gets his left cheek ripped open at the hands of the apparent leader of the mob.  After they drag him elsewhere, even when he warns them about the seven gates of evil, they continue to cut him to shreds with their barbed chains, striking his shoulder, chest and leg.  Still not done, they drag him over to a wall that they stake him to crucifixion style with spikes through the wrists.  Their final act is to throw acid in his face followed by a shovel of quicklime, melting more than half of his face off.  It’s obviously a dummy head, but the idea of doing that to a man is still pretty harsh.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:08:41.  A painter sees an apparition through a second floor window and promptly falls off the scaffolding.  As he relates the sight, he spits up a touch of red.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:17:23.  The poor plumber whose job it was to investigate why there was no water in the faucets but plenty in the basement reaches his final moments on earth.  A hand reaches out from a spot in a wall that had just opened up courtesy of a steady leak, latches onto his face and gouges his eyes out of his head, insane screaming going on all the while.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:18:31.  Gal with really creepy eyes…

N       0:20:36.  A gruesome discovery of Joe’s body.  When turned away from the wall he was propped face-up against, he dribbled a semi-solid kind of ooze from his mouth as he slides down the wall, collapses and finally dies.  The surprises aren’t over, however, as a badly decomposed body surfaces from the floor of water in the basement.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:21:53.  An autopsy wraps on Joe as the doctor sews up an incision on his chest.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:27:27.  Mary Ann arrives at the morgue to dress Joe in his best suit.  Her daughter waits outside, duly forlorn.  At the mark, something we don’t see frightens her and either she faints or falls and hits her head because she’s out cold and can’t move from the tall jar of clear liquid ready to rain down upon her face.  We find it isn’t just water as her mother’s face melts away like a candle, bubbling and popping as the substance reaches the eyes, the reddish shampoo-like slime her flesh was turning into creeping away from her body and chasing her daughter across the room.  Opening the first door that will yield, a body with a badly destroyed right eye leans out over her.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:33:21.  Now the daughter has the creepy eyes…

N       0:37:03.  Emily, after touching an old painting, starts bleeding from her palms.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:40:45.  Liza sees a horrific flashback from 74 years prior of the “warlock” execution.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:43:28.  More creepy eyes…

N       0:47:50.  An architect who was examining plans for the Seven Doors Hotel falls from the ladder and lands on the hard marble floor.  Then, from out of the dark corners of the room come many tarantulas who gravitate toward him and start crawling over his body.  Unfortunately for him, he wakes as the creatures start tearing chunks of flesh off, one of them tearing out a piece of his tongue, red flowing all the while as the voracious arachnids rip his skin apart.  SR: SSSSS

N       0:57:20.  Joe, resurrected from a bathtub of opaque liquid (blackish water, old blood or mold), forces Martha’s head onto one of the spikes the “warlock” was nailed to the wall with, said spike penetrating her head completely and forcing out one of her eyes, which remains stuck on the end.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:01:24.  The living corpses of everyone who’s died thus far back Emily into a corner.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:03:41.  After defending Emily from the otherworldly visitors, her dog turns around and rips her throat completely out before tearing off her right ear, much blood gushing.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:09:04.  Everything suddenly starts turning red: it drips on Liza’s shoulders; is surges into the water in the basement; the old painting that scratched Emily breaks out with it in many places.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:11:50.  Red appears on Liza’s palms before several horrific beings break through the window behind her and try to drag her in with them.  John shoots one twice in the arm before landing a shot directly in the head.  None of the others get their mitts on her, but one has notable damage to his skull making it look like the top had been detached before and re-stitched.  He continues to fire at them as Liza runs into a nearby elevator, eventually felling another with a direct head-kill.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:14:09.  Appearance #4 of the creepy eyes.

N       1:15:53.  John actually reloads in the elevator.  Count for yourself to make sure I’m right – he fired at least fifteen rounds from a six-shooter, never stopping to reload that I could see.  Also, look back when he first jumps into the room in which he encounters Harris – the wall shakes with his entrance and exit, a supposedly sturdy wall wobbles like paper.  At 1:18:52, he runs out again – after firing ten shots and still not reloading.  Also, it’s curious that the last Z he shoots dead falls after a chest shot, two and three of which failed to stop his fellow Zs.

N       1:15:00.  A window explodes in the hospital, sending shards of glass flying into Harris’s face.  It’s curious to note that blood doesn’t course from where the glass hits, but flows from places that couldn’t possibly have been affected.  Hmm…  SR: SSSSS

N       1:18:29.  In the elevator, Mary Ann’s daughter turns on Liza.  John catches wind of it in time and blasts her head off in a gory explosion.  SR: SSSSS

N       1:21:38.  Both John and Liza become the final prisoners of the hotel…and get the creepy eyes.