YMMV / The Seventh Seal

• Award Snub: Not even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, even though it was Sweden's official entry for the award.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The squirrel that shows up and starts gnawing on a tree stump after Death cuts down the tree to kill the man climbing it. Is it symbolism? Faux Symbolism? Narrative Filigree for verisimilitude? Just a plain old BLAM?
  • Alternatively, part of the scene's Funny Moments.
• Catharsis Factor: If a viewer is unaffected by the Nightmare Fuel and Jerkass Woobie elements at play in the scene, they may very well view Raval’s death via Black Plague as this - seeing him wail and beg like a coward after being such a repulsive human being to the other characters.
• Heartwarming Moment: The main characters get together to share a humble meal, and for the first time in his life since the Crusades, Block — the Knight in Sour Armor — softens up and admits he will treasure this moment forever.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The actor who played Death, Bengt Ekerot, himself died fairly young (at age 51, in 1971).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Block contemplating a carving of Jesus on the cross, since Max von Sydow went on to play Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told.
• Jerkass Woobie: Raval is one of the purest examples imaginable. He's an utterly loathsome human being, yet his anguished death scene is quite disturbing and affecting.
• Magnificent Bastard: Death is the elegant, grim personification of death who neither knows nor cares what awaits beyond the material world. Allowing the knight Antonius Block, in his crisis of faith, to hold a chess game with the reaper, Death proves a cagey and manipulative opponent who heads off Block's every attempt to stay him. Leading the cast members to their deaths and even tricking Block as a priest in confession to discover his strategy, Death is ultimately triumphant but allows Block a final meal with his wife before coming for them both and leading away his victims in a Danse Macabre.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Referenced far more than it is actually watched.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Jöns gouging out Raval’s eyes as retribution for tormenting Jof.
  • Block's Heroic Sacrifice.
• Moral Event Horizon: In a film devoted to how various different characters deal in their own ways with a dying world and their approaching death, Raval stands out as a man disdainful of everyone else's life who chooses to spend his remaining time ruining his fellow men. According to Jöns he convinced his liege and many other men to join the Crusade and sacrifice their lives over a purpose that he himself had naturally no intention of giving his life for. When he is encountered years later, he is seen taking advantage of the Black Death to abandon any pretention of faith and tries to rape a young girl only to be stopped by Jöns. And he is far from over as he later tortures and threatens to kill the actor Jof purely For the Evulz. His way of living ends up making survival appear worthless.
• Retroactive Recognition: The girl who is burnt at the stake is Maud Hansson, later to be cast as Lina, the maid at the Katthult farm and main antagonist of Emil.
• Tough Act to Follow: Bengt Ekerot as Death is one of the most iconic performances in film history, but he had trouble following it up and his career stalled (with Artistic Stimulation being a big factor as well).

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