I second Polter-Cow's motion that the "just kidding, I'm really gonna kill myself, not you" moment be retired as an overused TV cliche.

See, it didn't really ping me that way. I guess at the "I know," I got a tiny inkling that he might shoot himself, so it wasn't a bait-and-switch for me so much as a moment of suspense before we found out which one he had shot.

once he said "I know", I knew he was going to shoot himself. If he had said "not anymore", that would have been a bit more mysterious.

I guess at the "I know," I got a tiny inkling that he might shoot himself, so it wasn't a bait-and-switch for me so much as a moment of suspense before we found out which one he had shot.

It wasn't so much an inkling for me as completely obvious, especially when they cut away. So I wanted them to give me that moment, but they went for cheap suspense.

Huh. Two weeks in a row, the killer ends up dead. Will they ever actually get anyone in fucking jail ?

once he said "I know", I knew he was going to shoot himself. If he had said "not anymore", that would have been a bit more mysterious.

Ooooh. Yeah, that could be read both ways. I guess the "I know" was supposed to be read as "I know, I am weak and driven by my obsession to kill you, so I must do that now" rather than "I know, and now I will punish myself for that fact."

Huh. Two weeks in a row, the killer ends up dead. Will they ever actually get anyone in fucking jail ?

I had a theory that maybe this was Web's secret agenda but really, how long could that go unnoticed?

What if Strong killed himself because he saw himself has one of Brandt's conquests. He had been shadowing Brandt for years raping the women Brandt had been with and then progressing to raping and killing them. Seeing himself as one of Brandt's conquest meant that he needed to die too.

So you think they're reacting to the content, in terms of what they're talking about? I think you might be right, but it's imprecise to call that gore.

I think it's the same effect as in Se7en, where the ending twist was so emotionally powerful that a LOT of people remember seeing Gwyneth Paltrow's severed head in the box even though it was never shown. You're touching people with charged scenes that spark little gory tableaux in their minds, and they remember seeing them rather than imagining them. Which I think is a sign of excellent storytelling, by the way, but I'm not terribly averse to gory mental pictures.

at the "I know," I got a tiny inkling that he might shoot himself, so it wasn't a bait-and-switch for me so much as a moment of suspense before we found out which one he had shot.

That's pretty much my experience. I wasn't sure if he was gonna kill himself because he recoginized he's weak, or kill Brandt as compensation for being weak, so it was suspenseful for me.

Mind you, head-in-a-box would have been somewhat anticlimactic, gore-wise, in Se7en. I still have spontaneous shudders based on bits from that film.

Mind you, head-in-a-box would have been somewhat anticlimactic, gore-wise, in Se7en. I still have spontaneous shudders based on bits from that film.

The amazing thing about Se7en is that the only on-screen violence is comitted by Brad Pitt - everything else is after the fact. It's the imagining of how the victims got that way that brings the creepieness.

The all-time king of essentially non-violent, shudder-inducing movies is the original Dutch VANISHING. I've seldom been so creeped out as I was by the final shot of that film (it was a literal flesh-crawling moment for me).

everything else is after the fact. It's the imagining of how the victims got that way that brings the creepieness.

Beg to differ. That movie blew its creepiness budget in the first 20 minutes, and started borrowing from the Grand Guignol budget.

Matt's ponit remains true, i.e. being primed to imagine awfulness is more emotionally arresting than if you'd seen the explicit awfulness. I think it goes double whenever severed heads are involved, because of how fake severed heads tend to look.