Movies Like Se7en That Crime Thriller Fans Need To See

Gritty, thrilling, and with a sense of darkness that puts most horror movies to shame, David Fincher's 1995 thriller "Se7en" is a movie audiences have come back to time and time again.

There are a lot of reasons why people can't let it go. After all these years, John Doe's grisly, miserable executions — all framed as moral killings, with each victim embodying one of the seven deadly sins — is still nightmare fuel. There's an inventive but practical cruelty to them that engraves each permanently on the audience's memory. 

Then, of course, there are the performances. Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey all excel here. Each play archetypes as much as characters, evoking larger-than-life, universal ideas that feel real and symbolic at the same time. But perhaps most importantly, the film has that unforgettable quality shared by all great movies, regardless of genre. Once you've seen it, you'll never forget it. Even the way it looks — its greenish filters, its grimy and rain-drenched sets — has become a touchstone of pop culture.

It's an iconic film — one of the best thrillers you can find — and if you want to find more like it, here are some pre- and post- "Se7en" classics that hit many of the same haunting notes. Just remember to keep the lights on.

By the end of "Gone Baby Gone," you'll probably be thinking about a certain "Se7en" quote: "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."

"Gone Baby Gone" plunges you into another dark, high-stakes crime that seems to reveal the worst side of humanity — and ultimately pushes the detectives investigating it to a breaking point. Private eyes Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) are hired to find a missing 4-year-old girl, and every lead they follow up on suggests that it's unlikely their search will have a happy ending. This is a grim case, one where they can't even trust the girl's own mother, Helen, who is neglectful and almost constantly high. And when — after far too much bloodshed — they finally have an answer, they don't know what to do with it. How do you live a moral life in a world this broken?

This is a movie that is strong throughout, but lifted to a whole new level by its ending. When the credits roll, you'll feel like you just got hit on the head by a two-by-four: You know, the same feeling you had when you finished "Se7en."

Like "The Silence of the Lambs" — a stone-cold classic in its own right — "Manhunter" is a Hannibal movie that showcases the same kind of darkness and determined protagonists as "Se7en." William Petersen plays Will Graham, an FBI profiler who reluctantly comes back from early retirement to try to solve a particularly violent string of murders committed by "the Tooth Fairy" (Tom Noonan). To re-familiarize himself with getting inside a killer's head, he visits the worst one he ever caught: Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Yes, we know it's generally Lecter, but in the end credits here he's listed as "Doctor Lecktor." No, we don't know why.)

"Manhunter" is a movie stuffed full of great performances, from Petersen's icy and perfectly focused intelligence to Noonan's ability to terrify you and touch your heart at the same time. But we have to single out Brian Cox's Hannibal: He's less of a showman than Anthony Hopkins' version, but he's every bit as capable and deadly. And his affable, almost normal charm can make your skin crawl. It all adds up to a hero vs. villain setup for the ages.

The 1988 Dutch film "The Vanishing" has an irresistible premise that should appeal to "Se7en" fans — especially the ones who would open that box at the end. Ordinary couple Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) stop at a rest area, and Saskia goes inside to buy them some drinks. As far as Rex knows, she never comes out again.

Her abrupt, unexplained disappearance haunts the rest of Rex's life — long after he's moved on romantically, he's still obsessed with finding out what happened to Saskia. And we only know a little more than he does. We've seen the culprit, a superficially normal family man who meticulously and chillingly planned an abduction. But we don't know what happened after he found Saskia. We can only find that out when Rex does, as he and the killer come to a strange and unsettling deal.

A chilling study of the costs of being unable to walk away, "The Vanishing" is, as Roger Ebert put it, "a thriller about knowledge — about what the characters know about the disappearance, and what they know about themselves." It's an irresistible philosophical hook, and it comes with one of cinema's most horrifying endings.

If you like tense thrillers with terrifying but compelling villains, look no further than the propulsive "Green Room." The film centers on a punk band traveling from show to show. They're broke enough to have to siphon gas to keep their van on the road, so they can't turn down a gig — even if it does turn out to be at a rural neo-Nazi bar. But when it's time to go, Pat (Anton Yelchin) realizes he left his phone in the green room. He goes back for it — and witnesses the tail end of a brutal murder. The skinheads barricade the band in the green room until they can decide what to do with them. They just have to wait for their leader (a calm and scary Patrick Stewart) to arrive.

When he does, his orders are clear: No one gets out alive. The movie turns into an unbelievably tense, gory siege where the band — and their reluctant ally — have to try to escape the bar and get to safety even though they're surrounded by better numbers and better weapons.

You won't be able to look away. As The Atlantic's 2016 review said, this is "a tense gore-fest, one that's as grimy and claustrophobic as the titular room. But scrape off the scum, and you'll find ... visual artistry, dark humor, smart writing, and glints of humanity." All of which makes it a good, adrenaline-fueled match for "Se7en."

For another cynical look at urban decay and psychological pressure, check out Martin Scorsese's classic "Taxi Driver." Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, an isolated, increasingly disturbed man who exists on the night side of New York: a bleak world full of sex, violence, and degradation. Travis is carrying around a lot of darkness, and sooner or later, it's going to leak out into the world. The movie focuses on how thin a line there might be between a villain and a so-called hero, if they're both motivated by the same unstable urges. Is he going to be a political assassin? Or an acclaimed vigilante?

One of the most powerful parts of "Taxi Driver" is that Travis' loneliness is both palpable and relatable. Most of us have hopefully never come close to being John Doe, but Travis — clumsily trying to reach out and always being a little too off-putting to everyone — hits closer to home. His descent is terrifying, but we can also understand his mind every step of the way. That's the balancing act that makes "Taxi Driver" one of the best films of all time.

If what you liked about "Se7en" was the sense of coming up against an almost unfathomable darkness, pick up "No Country for Old Men" immediately. This Western neo-noir offers up an antagonist as scary and joyless as John Doe — but this one almost feels like a force of nature.

Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is relentless in his quest to track down a stolen bag of money, and it doesn't matter how many dead bodies he leaves in his wake. He'll kill for revenge, convenience, or simple whim. With his bowl cut and his cattle-killing captive bolt pistol, he's also just uncanny — an otherworldly presence matched against the resourceful but very human Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). Both of them are followed by the weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), who has seen too much over the course of his career and doesn't know if he'll be able to see all this too. He and Morgan Freeman's Somerset would have a lot to talk about.

With its stunning cinematography, high-caliber performances, excruciating tension, and entrancing sense of place, "No Country for Old Men" is essential viewing.

Like "Se7en," the Korean thriller "Memories of Murder" follows detectives faced with a crime bleaker and more disturbed than anything they've been faced with. The case doesn't reach John Doe's levels of baroque sadism, but it's more than enough for a small town detective — and eventually even the Seoul bigshot who joins him is overwhelmed by what they're seeing. Director Bong Joon-ho's characteristic dark humor provides a lot of energy and edge, making this part social satire: The "investigative techniques" of brutality and guesswork are as hard to take as the crimes.

The movie even has the same rain and griminess that characterize "Se7en." Once Detective Park Doo-man (Song Kang-ho) looks at the two bodies left in a drainage ditch, the peaceful countryside and golden fields around him seem to vanish. We're in a darker place now, and even the visuals know it.

The film is a masterpiece, one that Sight & Sound named as one of their key films of the 2000s: It's "a devastating story about the failures of both corruption and rigour," one where there's no sure way to prevent or even avenge evil. All you can do, in "Memories of Murder," is try to live with your own conscience.