Forgive me serial killer from the movie Se7ven starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt for I have sinned
Every weekend during my formative teen years, my dad and I would sit down to watch two episodes of The X-Files back-to-back. Covering all nine original seasons took nearly two years and gave me a crippling addiction to the classic story genre: Best Friends Investigate Crimes.
Naturally, Se7en became my thing, but looking back on it, it’s a little disturbing how much I loved it. A genuinely disturbing tale about a serial killer who bases his murders on the Seven Deadly Sins, Se7en is the kind of movie Fox News would blame school shootings on.
But I turned out okay, right? It’s not like I’ve wondered how John Doe would kill me if he had his way or anything, right? It’s not like I’ve wondered how he’d kill me based on each of the seven deadly sins... But even if I did, that’s normal, right?
Right?
Pride
Book-lovers will be able to relate the feeling of immense superiority that comes with reading. Tik Tok? Pah. Instagram? Ha. I can read for fifteen whole minutes without having to check my phone. So John Doe would probably make me read It Ends With Us at gun point until I beg for death. Wouldn’t take long.
Envy
Oh, an easy one! More than anything, I want to be a published author. So, I think John Doe would help me find connections in the industry until one day I get my fantasy series published, and then decades later would foil my every attempt to write the final book until my fans turn on me because they’re so sick of waiting and one of them murders me.
Wrath
Nothing makes me angrier than those stupid new bottle caps. If you’re in Europe, you know the ones—the ones that are attached to the bottle so when you’re drinking, the cap scrapes your face!? And then you can’t close it properly because the piece of plastic that attaches the lid is always at an awkward angle?! John Doe won’t even have to do anything for this one—any day now my blood will boil me alive.
Sloth
Apparently it happened once where a sloth fell from a tree and killed someone? But if I’m honest, I think the only way John Doe could kill me with a sloth is if he showed me a picture of a really cute one with a big smile and told me that if I didn’t find a way to die right now then the sloth would get sad.
Greed
Nothing gets me licking my lips and rubbing my hands together like a cartoon wolf ready to chow down than the graphic novel shelf at a comic book shop. Sure, regular books are nice, but those comic collections? So slick! So shiny! So colourful!
I think John Doe would get me a job at a comic book shop where I get a discount on any book I want but it’s such a toxic work environment that I start to fall out of love with the medium so I have to quit and say goodbye to my discount forever, sending me into a teensy bit of a depression wherein I wrestle with grim reality that my dream job sucked and now I don’t know what to do with my life and maybe that kills me somehow? (All of that actually happened except the last part 😊)
Or maybe he could just crack me over the skull with a Sandman omnibus—whatever suits.
Gluttony
Another easy one. It’s Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. He kills me with Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. How? Think of the worst way you can imagine killing someone with a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and pretend I wrote that.
Ew, gross, that’s what you thought of?
Lust
Based on my hopeless, emotional, teenage crush on Miranda Cosgrove from iCarly, (I had to turn off the episode where she got a boyfriend) I imagine John Doe could devise some kind of Saw trap that broadcasts live on the internet that’s, like, a commentary on parasocial relationships or the internet or something? Would that be clever?
(Miranda if you're reading this, I'm sorry, I have a girlfriend now and she'd never leave me for a guy called 'Griffin'.)
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