Se7en opens with a series of short clips of a pair of worn down male hands cutting and writing on photos and sheets of text.
The prominent colors in this sequence are red and black. These are considered warning colors in nature, and therefore we know early on that this film is going to be a thriller/horror. The color red is shown when you see the hands placing photos in liquid, suggesting that this person is developing photos for some reason.
There is a lot of shocking and disturbing imagery in this opening, such as the person cutting off their own skin with a razor blade and sorting old photos of children and family. These actions suggest that the owner of the pair of hands may not be mentally stable and is possibly a serial killer or psycho.
The fact that we only see hands and no face gives a strong sense of mystery and suspense. The identity of the man is kept secret for the entire opening, so we anticipate who they are and want to keep watching so that we can find out. The lighting of the clips is low key and this adds to the mysterious nature of the opening. We associate darkness with the unknown and the dangerous, so this is effective in building tension.
The opening is made up of lots of short scenes played after each other. The short length of them makes the whole atmosphere very tense as you don't get to really see what's going on. The scenes are joined together with straight cuts, cross fades and a fade to black. The cross fades make the sequence seamless and make it feel eerie as the scenes overlay each other. This overlays effect is disturbing in some ways and looks almost ghostly.
At some points nearer the end of the sequence, we see scribbles and indesice characters flash up over the clips. This makes the footage look disjointed and broken. The scribbles are white, which gives a strong contrast over the darkness of the clips themselves, emphasizing this darkness.
Everything in this sequence is shown very close up and there are no long or mid shots whatsoever. This allows an audience to focus on the objects themselves, such as the razor blade, and makes them think about why the objects shown are being shown. These close ups are very suspenseful as we can't see the whole frame and therefore come up with our own conclusions on what is going on.
All the clips are filmed with a mounted, still camera. This makes an audience feel very observant, as though you're actually a part of the scene itself. It doesn't allow for any distraction from the imagery we're being shown.
The music in the scene is very disjointed sounding, making you feel uncomfortable from the start. This music is paired with screams, which are ominous and fit with the horror genre. These screams tell us that the hands in the sequence probably belong to a killer, as they make you think of a woman being murdered. There's no dialogue in this opening, making the whole thing more mysterious and tense.
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