The cinematic craze David Fincher wants you to know he didn’t start: “And I say fuck you”
In his career, David Fincher has made several uncompromising films staring into the dark, depraved abyss of the human soul, tackling serial killers and granting audiences nightmares to burrow under their skin.
The thing that has always separated Fincher from the average gore-obsessed hack, though, is that he doesn’t make horror movies that revel in their sadism. Instead, he makes procedural thrillers and mysteries that keep the majority of their violence implied and/or offscreen, akin to the Greek Tragedy ilk, preferring to keep the focus on the troubled investigators running themselves ragged to solve a case and the hubris of the killers seeing them fall.
Unfortunately for Fincher, he may have executed his explorations of the evil that men do a little too well, because from time to time, his films have been lumped into the ‘torture porn’ genre that swept cinema in the 2000s. During this weird period, audiences thought nothing of paying to see the human body be mangled in all manner of elaborate, disgusting ways in movies like Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek, Captivity, and The Collector, as well as Takashi Miike’s Audition and Ichi the Killer.
While Miike’s entries in the genre were pioneering and offered more than simply splatter for splatter’s sake, the rest of these films only seemed concerned with making audiences lose their lunch in the cinema. However, what can’t be argued is that Eli Roth’s Hostel, for example, is a million miles away from something like Se7en, which only shows the aftermath of violence and the effect it has on the traumatised people tasked with uncovering why it happened.
With this distinction in mind, it’s easy to see why it’s like nails on a chalkboard for Fincher when he hears someone say, “You started torture porn”. To that baseless accusation, he replies, “And I say, ‘Fuck you,’” and he stressed to The Guardian, “I actually think we were fairly responsible about the notions of the violence”. To him, Andrew Kevin Walker’s grim yet restrained script was clear that “you don’t need to see stuff” because the story “unlocks the Pandora’s box of your imagination, in a really gripping way”.
Indeed, ‘imagination’ is at the core of Fincher’s bizarre association with a cinematic craze he wants nothing to do with, and doesn’t even watch himself. He made films that were so effective in getting under the audience’s skin by hinting at atrocities or keeping them just out of sight that people became convinced he’d actually shown more violence than he did.
Amazingly, he was even accosted by an irate woman at a Beverly Hills party who scolded him, “There is no need to make a stand-in of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head to find in the box. You don’t need to see that”. When he responded that he didn’t do that, and there is no shot of Paltrow’s head in the box during Se7en’s iconic climax, she didn’t believe him. “The imagination, if properly primed, can do more than any army of makeup artists,” Fincher concluded wearily.
As an interesting postscript to his torture porn troubles, the movie that prompted his rant was Saw, which The Guardian accused of ripping off Se7en wholesale. He claimed he’d never seen James Wan’s 2004 hit, which launched a gruesome franchise, but if he had, he’d have likely had some sympathy for Wan.
You see, the Australian helmer also wanted nothing to do with torture porn, and his original Saw movie is nowhere near as explicitly violent as the sequels. He was inspired by Se7en, wanting Saw to be an investigative movie that pushed the violence slightly further than the director, but not by much. When he realised that the studio wanted the sequels to focus on grimmer, bloodier, and increasingly elaborate death traps, though, he dropped the ball on the court, never to return.
