A Thorough Look at Saw
In which I wrote an entire doctorate thesis over the summer about an eighteen-year-old horror movie.
Hey there! If you follow me on Tumblr, you might recognize that this is my magnum opus, the thing I slaved over the entire summer of 2021 to release it in video form and exorcise the ghost of Saw out of my brain. I’m reposting it because I’m still proud of the work I’ve done and would like it to be accessible for people who don’t want to sit through my horrible video production. If you would like to hear my horrible Eastern European accent and see some visual gags not included in writing, you can watch that video here.
Background
The year is 2021. The pandemic has been raging for a full year. Despite that, the movie industry is dragging on, even though the cinemas are closed and streaming services are splintering into countless corporate monstrosities. The vibes are… deteriorating.
In this bleak atmosphere, the best bet on a movie is a safe one, so studios continue pumping out sequels and remakes. Spiral: From the Book of Saw comes out. The ninth one in he franchise. Someone, an unnamed, unsung hero, wonders ‘Hey, I remember those! Good old Saw’. But wow, it’s the ninth one, and they don’t even remember what happened in the original, so they should probably catch up if they wanna check Spiral out in the slowly opening theaters. So they do. They sit back as the realization slowly sets in…
‘Hey, does anyone else think that Saw is, like, good?’
The great Tumblr Saw renaissance of 2021 is truly something for the history books. We can logically deduce it was kickstarted by the release of Spiral, but the interesting thing is that the hysteria almost entirely surrounded the original for the initial months as everyone slowly made their way through the franchise and even then the 2004 tour de force would not get dethroned from the pedestal of Tumblr’s hot new thing. I know most people perceive Tumblr as a dead social media, a graveyard of soft grunge pictures and Arctic Monkeys quotes, but it’s actually a very vibrant community and my social media of choice, so I got to experience this phenomenon first-hand. And not only experience it, but be an active participator. As you can see, I was entirely lost in the sauce with everyone else. It ended up featuring on Tumblr’s round-up of top fifty talked about movies of the year and while the hysteria died out a bit now, I do think the zeitgeist tapped into a very valid, if surprising and a little bit shocking discovery. Saw is good, actually!
I’ll leave the analysis of the Tumblr Saw renaissance to the Tumblr historians, I just want to contribute to this rediscovery of the often discounted horror classic. I’m not much of an active horror enthusiast or at least I don’t seek out these communities, but it does seem that the consensus outside of Tumblr is still very much that Saw is a guilty pleasure at best, an affront to the art of cinema at worst, which is very strange, right? I mean, this movie is credited with revolutionizing the horror genre, it launched two horror moviemakers into stardom and yet it’s given all the reverence of a stale piece of bread. So this is what I’m here for. To give proper reverence. To reappraise Saw.
Now, some ground rules. First of all, I am not saying the entire franchise is good. I, personally, enjoy it, but it’s not Oscar-worthy by any means and, in my opinion, does the original dirty in a lot of regards. Maybe this could be a point of discussion for the future, who knows? Second of all, I’m going to lay a lot of groundwork before going into thorough analysis of the movie itself because I want to craft somewhat of a lens for you to see the film through so you can understand where I’m coming from or else when I start talking about Hegelian dialectics and communist theory you’ll think I’m certified. If you’re already on my level of third eye open, chakra-popping, red-pilled sigma Saw analysis you can skip directly to the discussion of themes.
Let’s get into it.
Lawrence Gordon
Lawrence Gordon is the head of every HOA committee. Lawrence Gordon is a guy from every allergy medication ad. Lawrence Gordon is Carlyle Cullen with all the medical knowledge and no vampirical charm.
He’s the kind of guy that’s supposed to be an American everyman, which is kind of hilarious seeing that he’s paired with actual everyman Adam. Lawrence is an oncologist, has a wife, a very cute daughter and is played by Cary Elwes, so I do not really understand what more you can ask from life at this point. But no, you gotta sleep with one of your med students too. Which, by the way, he doesn’t even seem to be that excited about? One would assume that a partner cheats to get some variety, I don’t know, relieve some symptoms of that crushing midlife crisis, but Lawrence treats his secret date like a dentist appointment. Almost makes you think - Lawrence doesn’t love his objectively MILF wife, he doesn’t like his mistress… It’s almost like there’s a common denominator here. More on that later.
Every Saw victim, by law of the land, must have some fatal flaw. The curious thing about Lawrence to me is that according to the movie (or at least Jigsaw) is his fatal flaw doesn’t seem to be cheating. This seemed like the big thing to me, Lawrence’s strained home life and his flirtation with his student is given significant screen time, it gets nods in the script throughout the whole film, but apparently his whole thing is… emotional negligence in general? Which, yes, cheating on your partner and tuning out of your family life is definitely emotional negligence, but I think the point the movie is trying to push is that he’s also emotionally negligent in his professional life. The whole thing of being an oncologist is that often you’re dealing with terminal patients and you’re the one that has to break the news to them in a compassionate way and Lawrence doesn’t… excel in this. Jigsaw is drawn to that. There is no question that Lawrence is an excellent medical practitioner, he’s obviously very intelligent in the traditional sense, but he does seem to be a bit stunted in the emotional intelligence department for whatever reason. (You could even argue this is why Jigsaw was DRAWN to Lawrence. In the cinema business we call that foreshadowing.)
You can interpret this character flaw systemically: Lawrence is a well-off white guy with a well-respected job and a nuclear family, all aspects of a person whose empathy for different people muscle doesn’t get a lot of stretching. You can clearly sense that in his outburst against Adam, who’s clearly lower class, or a “bottom-feeder”. Funnily enough, the fact that Cary Elwes is violently British and barely contains his accent in more yelling-heavy scenes only underlines this character theme while simultaneously making the movie very funny.
Despite all this, Lawrence Gordon is not an unsympathetic character. In fact, the movie itself heavily pushes that we identify with him for the whole first act. He clearly loves his daughter and has a very parental presence in the film, especially contrasted with Adam’s twenty-something stoner energy, only strengthened by Elwes’s casting. I mean, come on, who wouldn’t trust dad Westley with their entire life. Furthermore, partially through Elwes’s acting decisions and partially through Leigh Whannell’s script (which I called the Pulitzer commission about all week about, but they haven’t returned my calls) we get the sense that Lawrence’s emotional negligence doesn’t really come from a place of malice. Ennui, passive dissatisfaction with no easy solutions, probably, but not because he’s a fundamentally bad human being.
I have a lot to say on his character development in the sequels, either active or implied, you better believe me, but (for now) we’re limiting ourselves with the OG. Lawrence is a very interesting, morally gray character, kind of a platonic ideal for a good Jigsaw victim. You can argue either way about whether he deserved to be put in a trap, your decision directly correlated to how distant your dad was, and his decisions when inside the trap showcase the extremes of his flaws and virtues and human compassion and desperation when they’re pushed to the limit.
Now onto the gay little drowned rat.
Adam
Faulkner… Stanheight… Radford. Let’s just go with Adam.
Adam is literally everything to me. He’s just some guy. That’s his whole character. He has a shitty apartment, all of his friends bully him, he has exactly one hobby and probably listens to Nine Inch Nails. Leigh Whannell has this quirk when he writes characters for himself to play that appeals to me, personally, just so much. By necessity it obviously can’t be standardized to one character, since Whannell played different people that he wrote himself in different movies, but if I tried, I’d simply sum up it as “some guy”. I can see Adam picking up unfinished cigarettes from the ground to smoke them, and this is a compliment.
I already alluded to how Lawrence and Adam are different sides of the same coin, and I’ll expand on it later since it’s a big and intentional theme in the movie, but as his character necessitates - whatever Lawrence has, Adam hasn’t. Lawrence is a doctor, while Adam is basically a semi-legal version of a freelancer. He follows people and takes pictures of them for money, it’s implied that he survives paycheck to paycheck from these projects. Saw is, hilariously, mostly shot in one singular warehouse, but set design makes it very clear that while Gordon’s house is pricey if a little cold, Adam’s apartment is run-down and is famously described as a shithole.
Interestingly, most of Adam’s characterization was actually cut from the original script while Lawrence’s survived, but that original script tells us a few very important things that are only implied in passing in the movie. The script includes a very short scene in which Adam’s mother implores him to come home in a voicemail, saying that his father is not angry anymore. Now, I’m going to break my rule of limiting my analysis to only Saw, but this isn’t even widely seen as an official part of the canon and one character is mentioned in passing in Saw, so I think I’m good here. Anyway, in The Scott Tibbs Documentary, all the main characters are supposedly Adam’s circle of friends and yet even they treat him like garbage and in a twist of tragic irony make fun of him for falling victim to Jigsaw even though Scott Tibbs himself is a little bitch and that short film really does him justice. If you’ve seen Saw but never heard of this little piece of history, I really recommend it. What I’m getting at is that Adam as a character is isolated. Where Lawrence’s fatal flaw was discounting the support system he had, Adam has no one to lean on.
If Lawrence’s fatal flaw could be described as emotional negligence, Adam’s is plainly stated to be apathy. There are some very interesting implications of blaming him for working an immoral and arguably illegal job he needs to survive, but the point being made by Jigsaw is that he is apathetic to the consequences of his job, the invasion of people’s privacy and the subsequent ruining of their lives. The old script gives us more clues about this supposed apathy, when Adam mentions that he would’ve liked to be a veterinarian but was put off by the grades he needed to earn to go to vet school.
This is very interesting to me because in contrast to all this, Adam is a very lively, animated character, he’s the source of most if not all the comedic moments in the film. He reads like a very easy-going guy, just… normal. Going through life one day at a time, doing what he can. He clearly has zest for life, just doesn’t shoot for the stars. Wouldn’t exactly use the word “apathy” to describe this condition. We can better understand this contradiction by looking at the old script again. I can’t stress this enough, while most of his scenes were cut, the underlying character remained very much the same. The script just shows off his character traits in much clearer terms.
And this is where I risk to fall from interpretation into speculation. Because the original script, through Adam’s own mouth, tells us that he wanted to die. That in his eyes, it’s preferable to living. Now whether that’s supposed to signify the general condition of being poor, isolated and pessimistic or signal to us that Adam is genuinely depressed and suicidal, I can’t be the judge of that. The result is all the same, because whether it’s from material conditions or mental illness, Jigsaw’s view in-universe of suicidal ideation is… unfavorable. He sees it as a sign of weakness of spirit, ungratefulness for life, and that requires fixing in his deranged way. I’m pretty sure for the cost of the whole trap he would’ve been able to afford a few months of Prozac or an investment into vet education for Adam, but I digress.
This is what makes Adam a compelling tragic character in my eyes. You could very well argue he seems like a perfectly alright guy, and the reasons for him being put in a trap were entirely out of his control. There is even less discussion to be had about that than in Lawrence’s case.
Anyway, the most important aspects of Adam’s character is that he’s gay and smokes weed.
Amanda Young
Now, as much as I’d love to continue the tangents from now on, this is the Secondary Character Lightning Round.
Amanda, despite her famous debut in the reverse bear trap, plays a very minor role in this one. Her character gets much more fleshed out in the sequels (with varying success) and I’d love to talk for an hour just about her, but here she’s really just the girl in that one trap everybody knows about. Her inclusion, more than anything, tells us about what exactly Jigsaw considers a capital sin, and you can add addiction next to infidelity, being a bad doctor and poverty in that list. General ‘not appreciating life enough’ stuff. Most things about her character are implied through sparse dialogue and costuming. Her character visibly changes in tone between her torture scene and her interrogation, she has a more conservative outfit on, her hair is tied back, and she actually credits Jigsaw with ‘helping her’. Nice foreshadowing all around, thanks, Mr. Whannell. I’m sorry about Saw VI.
Detectives Sing and Tapp
Their whole thing honestly is to drive the plot, them being cops that investigate the Jigsaw case and all. Tapp also serves as a red herring, but his and his partner’s contributions to anything else but the whodunit is honestly minimal. Honestly the fact that this movie once sold on the premise that Danny Glover is in it big time is funny to me. Interestingly, cops will come to play a much bigger role in the sequels, which I overall consider a bad choice.
Alison and Diana Gordon
Once again, minor characters meant to flesh out Lawrence and drive the plot. However, there’s not really a place for that, but I really wanted to compliment Monica Porter and ESPECIALLY Makenzie Vega on their acting. The way she, while being a literal child, was able to portray pure fear had me googling California CPS numbers, but apparently they were really considerate for her needs and she was just very professional on set, which is honestly a delight.
John Kramer
Just as a fun challenge for myself, I tried to get this far without any major spoilers but that’s the end of that so if that bothers you, your road stops here. But, come on, this movie is like ten years old so… Wait. 2004. EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD? THIS JOKE IS ALREADY DRIVEN INTO THE GROUND BY OTHER REVIEWERS? Anyway. John Kramer is Jigsaw.
John’s whole thing is that he’s a terminal cancer patient and as if that wasn’t tragic enough they tacked on a bunch of other melodramatically traumatic shit on top in the sequels, but that doesn’t concern us, so let’s stop at cancer. His character is intentionally left very vague right up until the end to facilitate the whodunit, so there’s really not much I can tell you about his character solely in terms of this movie besides ‘cancer makes man sad, sad man turns to torture’.
His biggest thing is this Batman-esque moral compass, Saw’s whole thing is that Jigsaw doesn’t kill his victims, just kinda tortures them and then gives them an unsavory way to escape and live life with a whole new outlook. He’s obviously an old geezer with a knack for engineering, has enough money to pull this whole thing off and probably some regrets about his own life, even though none of the movies ever state that one explicitly.
The most important things about his character are stated through his choice of people to torture. Lawrence seems like the obvious one, him being John’s not-so-good doctor and all, but the other ones are much more telling in their lack of relation. Since Adam and Amanda have at best incidental connections to John, the fact that he decided to torture their human flaws out of them speaks of his view on them. Of course the old boomer would have things to say about addiction and a guy trying to survive poverty and not being so cheery about it. Maybe if Adam and Amanda just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and stayed out of trouble there wouldn’t be a problem at all.
I really don’t see the point in analyzing John’s moral alignment very thoroughly because by the design of the movie, Jigsaw’s crimes, especially accounting for the sequels, don’t really amount to a robust ideology. In this sense John is really more of a plot device, especially in the first movie, although the sequels work very hard to paint him as a kind of Old Testament God figure, who dispenses judgement as he pleases, and we’re meant to see his decisions as the final authority on human morality, whether we agree with it or not.
Plot recap
From here recapping the plot itself should be easy enough because the main draws of watching Saw for the first time are figuring out the whodunit and experiencing the spooky scary gore that it’s so famous for. It’s not exactly a complex film plot-wise, although it has some fun twists and turns throughout.
It starts where it needs to start, no playing around: Adam wakes up in a gnarly bathroom and discovers he’s chained to a pipe. Lawrence is chained similarly across the room from him. There’s a dead guy in the middle, apparently from a self-inflicted shot in the head.
I want to make note of the characters’ reaction to this set-up. Adam is immediately freaking out, but Lawrence seems weirdly calm. I understand it should come off like he woke up earlier and already went through his little panic moment and is just generally more composed than Adam, but what it really does is make Lawrence suspicious as hell, which Adam clocks immediately. I think this is a very nice touch because even though we’re meant to identify with Lawrence and be somewhat comforted by his presence, if I woke up with my leg chained to a pipe and an old white guy in a dress-shirt across from me, I’d also flip my shit. Also, they play the Wilhelm scream for effect as they dramatically turn on the lights, and isn’t that just delightful? Sorry for the tangent. It will happen again.
From there on the escape room premise of the movie doesn’t take long to start up, they find some tapes in their pockets, the tapes say “I’d like to play a game, kill the other before this hour, or you’ll die”, which obviously means they have to get out of their chains first to reach the gun or some other weapon, et cetera, et cetera. The fun thing about this set-up - just two guys in a room trying to solve this puzzle - is that it takes no time at all to diverge into basically a therapy session/speed date/interrogation between the two characters, which is where the meat of this movie really lies, pun intended. Somewhere in the whole mix, they also figure out there are actually cameras observing them, so that’s fun. I bet they’d do numbers on Twitch. After solving a few puzzles, Adam eventually finds a bag with two hacksaws and a fun mystery item, and Lawrence makes the connection that the guy taunting them is the Jigsaw killer. “He doesn’t want us to cut through our chains, he wants us to cut through our feet” and all that jazz. How does he know who Jigsaw is? Well, why, he was a suspect in the case! No notes here. Not suspicious at all. Here we get a flashback to Jigsaw’s previous crimes, in one of them he traps a guy who attempted suicide and Jigsaw thinks he just wanted attention, which is very telling.
You know, I just made the realization Hannah Baker would make for a great Jigsaw apprentice, with all them tapes and the guilt-tripping. Huh.
Anyway, Gordon’s pen-light is found on one of the crime scenes, and at this point we don’t know if it’s a plant or if he’s actually the killer. He doesn’t do himself any favors with his suspicious ass behavior, that’s for sure. He gets a visit from the police, and we get introduced to John and Zepp… Oh shit, I forgot to include Zepp in the character list. Oh well. Zepp is an orderly at the hospital Lawrence works at, he’s kind of hinted at having some connection to John. That’s it, really.
Crucially, here we learn about Lawrence’s infidelity and get to hear Amanda’s testimony. While this scene fits awkwardly in the movie itself, it’s obviously one of the highlights. Amanda’s test is very viscerally terrifying, from the reverse bear trap contraption to the realization that her fellow inmate isn’t actually dead, just paralyzed, and she needs to cut him up to retrieve the key to free herself. Fun fact! Shawnee Smith’s scenes were all shot in one day and when they realized they don’t have enough footage, they couldn’t call her back up, so the nail polish hands you see digging around in pig gore are Leigh Whannell’s. He really can’t escape being in the RBT scenes even if he tries. The purpose of this scene really is to be amazing, iconic, show-stopping and introduce Amanda as another suspect when she mysteriously remarks that Jigsaw ‘helped her’.
Sing and Tapp manage to deduce Jigsaw’s whereabouts from Amanda’s videotape, but after a kerfuffle, a guy trapped in yet another contraption and an unfortunate incident with some trip-wire and a few shotguns, John escapes and Sing dies. And let me just say, for an elderly cancer patient, John is quite nimble! That man’s aerobics routine must be insane. We get a character building scene of Lawrence being a cold bitch towards his wife, but also him being a very nice dad.
Cut to the present, Lawrence’s wife and daughter are captured by an unknown perp and are being held hostage. Tapp, who’s convinced Lawrence is the killer (and who can blame him) surveys their apartment and begins to catch up that there’s something fishy going on in there.
Let’s get back to the bathroom. An interesting character moment is that Adam is actually the one to discover evidence that Alison and Diana are in danger, but doesn’t show it to Lawrence, driven by no clear motivation except kindness. And my favorite scene in the whole movie is coming up! Lawrence finds a box containing two cigarettes, a lighter, and a one-way cellphone and Adam is not only willing to smoke something he found very deliberately placed in this death trap, he’s more excited about the cigarettes than the phone with which you can call for help. The point of the cigarettes is to actually aid Lawrence’s objective in killing Adam. Jigsaw, in his flowery way of writing, claims that the dead man was poisoned, so his blood is very poisonous, so if you soak the cigarette in the blood and smoke it you’d also get poisoned. Yeah, I don’t know either, I have no good justification for that, it’s kind of stupid. But don’t worry, it gets worse. Lawrence and Adam try to fool whoever is behind the cameras into thinking this is exactly what Lawrence did, but after Adam’s horrible attempt at acting dead, he gets electrocuted. Through his chain. Yeah, whatever, I never said ‘Saw is very realistic, actually’.
Here we finally find out how Adam and Lawrence are related. We flash back to the day Adam got kidnapped, and we follow him into his apartment, into his dark room and boom! Pictures of Lawrence everywhere. No notes. Not creepy at all. Turns out Adam has been hired to spy and takes pictures of Lawrence by Tapp, so he knows about everything - the affair, the Jigsaw suspicions, the works. The mystery item in the hacksaw bag was all the pictures Adam took of Lawrence.
The tensions between our characters come to a boiling point. Adam is fed up with Lawrence trying to portray himself as a wholesome family man who has no idea what he did wrong to end up in this situation, Lawrence is fed up with Adam’s general antics, the invasion of his privacy and probably with the remains of his dignity being shattered. I really didn’t go into many details because I want to get this section over as quickly as possible, but up until this point Lawrence and Adam were really building up a bond, and all the clues they found wouldn’t have been discovered without their cooperation. Lawrence was opening up to Adam about his family, and Adam (although these lines were cut) was sharing his struggles with school and general existence. For me, this scene really rivals the final moments of the movie in its drama because in essence, this is just two people, who were lying to each other’s faces to keep up friendly appearances and some sense of inner morality, and their barriers being broken down in most intrusive ways. The whole point of the game was to pit Adam and Lawrence against each other, yet up until this point a brighter alternative seemed entirely possible.
From here on, everything escalates extremely quickly. It’s revealed that the person holding Alison and Diana captive is Zepp. Lawrence and Adam’s time to complete the game runs out. Alison and Diana break out of their constraints. Detective Tapp breaks into the Gordon apartment and manages to wound Zepp. In the commotion, Lawrence is on the line with Alison through the one-ended phone and believes his family is in grave danger, so he begins panicking. Having ran out of options, Lawrence takes the plunge and delivers us the tour de force of the movie - he cuts off his foot, reaches for the gun and shoots Adam. However, his time to do so ran out and Zepp finally arrives to unlock the door and tell him as much. But it turns out that Adam is still alive, and he entirely fucks Zepp’s shit up, which - deserved.
In between all this batshit crazy insane development, we actually get a very quiet, somber moment. There’s a glimmer of hope now, even though both Adam and Lawrence are bleeding out and in unimaginable pain. They clutch each other tightly, Adam begging Lawrence not to leave, while he promises that Adam is going to be alright and that he’s going to get help. Adam cries and grasps for Lawrence as he crawls away out of reach, promising he will bring someone back. There are a few frantic, but quiet seconds as Adam, collapsed and in pain, is considering his options for escape, rummaging through Zepp’s belongings.
What he finds is another cassette player. The final twist of Saw is that Zepp was just another victim, manipulated by Jigsaw to do his dirty work. Adam looks in shock as the realization washes over him, and John slowly gets up from the floor, shattering any hope of escape. We end the movie on Adam’s terrified face, realizing he never had a chance, as the door shuts in on him, and he’s left in the dark. Game over. The movie fades to black and all we’re left with is Adam’s desperate scream.
Production
Okay, so this got really dark and sad (and it will get this dark and sad again) but now I want to make a short intermission to talk about the production of this beast.
Usually I’m not too interested in how exactly my favorite movies got made but, as you can very clearly tell, this one gripped me body and soul. These two weird Australian guys have a chokehold on my consciousness, Letterboxd tells me I’ve seen 57% of movies James Wan directed and 76% of movies Leigh Whannell has written, and it accounts for all of their short form and unavailable stuff for the total number of productions, so bump these numbers up even higher by a technicality. I’m in too deep to not talk about it.
The most important thing to grasp is that Saw is the cumulative brainchild of both of these guys. James Wan is usually the one to get highlighted because we as a society believe that directors are in an entire league of their own and writers, editors and cinematographers are just background actors when it comes to making movies. But Leigh Whannell is really an equal partner in this creative relationship, and you should never ever underestimate just how much these guys like making movies with each other. Famously they’d go on to make Insidious together (and some… other films *cough* Dead Silence, Doggie Heaven) and some hits on their own (James: Conjuring, Malignant, Leigh: Invisible Man) but critically - these dudes just like to hang out. Like, when James Wan got the gig for Aquaman, I assume he was the one that gave Leigh a frankly miniscule, but still a speaking role in it as a pilot. When James was moving away from the Insidious franchise and Leigh took over as the director, they capped it off by giving James a small role of a theater director. These dudes just emit the energy of two guys having fun with the craft they love and, weirdly enough, it’s very apparent in Saw too. Maybe I’m reading way too deep into this, but it just radiates the excitement these two had, fresh out of film school and ready to make their first big, serious movie together and all the creative experiments that came with that. You can already make out the quirks that would go on to define them as creators, like James Wan’s fondness for camp and visual references to his vintage horror inspirations or Leigh Whannell’s goofy character writing and conscious choice of scream queen (scream king?) roles. They have this wholesome cooperation, Leigh apparently explicitly asked James to make him look taller in Saw, so most of his scenes are either shot so the camera is looking up at him or from about the waist up, so you can’t picture how tall he exactly is. See, I can’t help but find shit like this endearing, for me this is really an ideal of how making art cooperatively should be - joyful and with an eye for enhancing each other’s best qualities.
And it’s really great that they had that kind of outlook because the production of Saw was an absolute mess. One of the tenets of why Saw is good, actually, is that it didn’t fall apart before reaching cinemas. The entire shooting of the movie lasted only eighteen days, which meant that all the big name actors, excluding Cary Elwes, had minimal time on set, as I already mentioned Shawnee Smith’s scenes were shot in just one day. Elwes and Whannell did not have any time to rehearse their lines, and Elwes’ script length apparently averaged fourteen pages a day to learn on set. Hilariously, this resulted in both of them having a very bad time trying to imitate an American accent and Elwes once received a joke script that included Lawrence spewing racial slurs as a prank in the middle of filming and nearly quit the movie. They could only afford a few takes of each scene, meaning if they didn’t get stuff like the final scene in one take, they would’ve been fuuuucked. The bathroom set was literally disassembled around them as they wailed and writhed on that dirty floor to get a good shot. When they realized there was not enough good footage, James Wan and Leigh Whannell actually snuck in back on set at night and reshot scenes like the previously mentioned Amanda’s trap. This is also where the creative decision to use so many snapshots in the film comes from, not enough footage, but at least this one made for a very interesting stylistic touch. Additionally, they couldn’t afford professional props, so the hacksaws and chain cuffs you see are just modified hacksaws and chain cuffs, which predictably resulted in Whannell and Elwes getting stuck in their restraints through lunch breaks and Elwes actually cutting himself during the moment where Lawrence cuts off his foot. No money also meant no professional dummies, so for the six days that they were shooting the bathroom scenes, Tobin Bell had to lie on that nasty floor in a pool of blood completely motionless, god bless his heart. So you can see, the mere fact that they made it through production, let alone that the movie is quite well put together and earned ten times its budget, really speaks to the vision, dedication and, dare I say, love for horror and cinema of everyone involved.
I’m highlighting all of this because, in my opinion, we don’t have Saw in spite of all these difficulties, we have it because of them. There is a certain charm in low-budget indie films where the creators had to make creative decisions around their constraints, a charm that the sequels tried to capture with very limited success. The appearances are still there, but you can clearly tell the first one is such a labor of love, while the other ones have more of an eye for continuous profit. You can really see creative growth happening on screen in real time for James Wan and Leigh Whannell in this movie, the growth that enabled them to become horror cinema powerhouses that they are today. And I don’t know what to tell you, man, I as everybody else love a good underdog story and in all the noise people seem to forget that once upon a time Saw movies weren’t just a cash making machine.
Theme Breakdown
As we wrap up the section on production, I’d like to recount the story of how Saw actually came about. Straight out of film school, James Wan and Leigh Whannell were looking for a way to make a full feature film cheaply, so James came up with the idea of having two people confined to a singular space. They toyed around with the idea of having them stuck in an elevator for whatever reason (shoutout to Shyamalan and Devil (2010) lol, just six years late to the idea) but ultimately settled with two guys being chained to opposite ends of one room. The character of Jigsaw came about while Leigh Whannell was in a hospital, suffering from migraines induced by SJD (Shitty Job Disease) and convinced he had a brain tumor. He started thinking of a character who, having cancer, would place a similar limit on other people’s life expectancy, forcing them to recognize how fleeting life is.
And this is what’s fascinating to me. Saw came from the anxiety-inducing prospect that one day you might have to face the truth that your time is limited. I’m not as much of a hypochondriac like Whannell is, but I very much sympathize with how you can suddenly end up in that spiral of thoughts. Saw comes from that premise of impending doom, but the important thing is how it explores how people act on that premise.
Duality
I don’t think it’d be particularly controversial to say Saw is a movie about duality. Leigh Whannell admits as much, saying the film is all about Lawrence and Adam exchanging roles during the film, us supposedly starting out by empathizing with Lawrence and being suspicious of Adam and slowly moving into an opposite position, ultimately ending with recognizing how they’re both fucked up, complicated human beings. I don’t feel the need to reiterate just how much Lawrence and Adam bounce off of each other’s personalities because I established it quite thoroughly in their character descriptions.
There’s really not an abundance of thoughtful content about Saw on YouTube (no offense to all the ‘Top 10 MOST TWISTED Saw traps’ videos) but I really liked Ryan Hollinger’s video on the movie, it says most of the things I’m trying to say here in just twenty minutes. But the fun thing about that video is that Ryan correctly identifies that Saw was much more inspired by Cube rather than Se7en that it’s so often compared to but also kind of brushes the comparison off altogether by saying Se7en is much more focused on the duality of its two protagonists and Saw isn’t. Which is funny to me, because if you compare those two on the metrics of their cop duos then, yeah, no doubt, Se7en wins, but I don’t think that’s the couple that’s meant to act as a metaphor for duality in Saw. Ryan actually suspected Adam throughout the movie to be Jigsaw, a conclusion diametrically opposed to mine, so there is something to be said about how different people interpret these two characters and their interactions with each other.
It’s really a shame to me that so much of Adam’s characterization was cut from the final product because essentially that makes Lawrence superior to him as a more fleshed out character in the narrative, which goes against Whannell’s intention of establishing the theme of duality. Nevertheless, I think there are enough fundamental roots of a well-rounded character for us to consider Lawrence and Adam equals. And not only equals, but diametrically opposed ones. And you know what that means! It’s Hegel time!!!
Hegelian dialectics, in the most simple terms possible, is presenting two opposite ideas and making them hash it out like you’re a second-grader playing Barbies. We are presented with Lawrence - family, well-respected job, ultimate dissatisfaction - the thesis, and we are presented with Adam - isolation, poverty, passive apathy - the antithesis, we put them into one bathroom and make them bicker for an hour and a half, boom, synthesis. Now, I’ll be the first one to admit I don’t have a philosophy degree and, ultimately, it’s not that deep™, but I still think there’s enough here for people smarter than me to figure it out. I’m way too brain-rotted to explain Hegel properly, if you want that go watch PhilosophyTube, I’m just here to talk about my funky little splatter men. If we were presented with just one of these little guys, it would be relatively easy to sympathize with either of them: yes, Lawrence is a cheater and kind of bad at being an empathetic doctor, but he clearly loves his family and would do anything to reunite with them and, yeah, Adam’s work is kind of illegal and immoral, but he clearly does it out of necessity and seems like an alright guy overall. The trick is that they’re put against each other, and we’re forced to either take our pick which one we’d like to see dead by the rules of the game or reconcile that neither of them deserve this and the entire premise is entirely fucked.
The fun thing about the four dollar budget of Saw is that the costuming is… minimalistic. I mean, Adam wears a white t-shirt and blue jeans through most of the run-time, leading to the fandom ‘fixing’ his outfit by adding shit on his t-shirt or swapping it out for something else completely. The designers clearly had very little to work with, so I’m extremely impressed with how fitting the very simple outfits are for the characters. It highlights how archetypical these characters are and, from a horror perspective, just how normal they are, implying that all this could happen to anyone.
The visceral satisfaction of horror often stems from the fact that while the deaths of the victims are grisly, we kind of accept that they had it coming, so we can sit back and enjoy the progressively more creative kills, a trap (pun intended) the Saw sequels very much fall into. We wouldn’t like for the killer to be entirely right, but we like having a straw to hang on to, so we can ultimately leave the movie theater guiltless and satisfied. Saw completely throws this pretense out of the window and forces us in real time to reckon with the fact that John’s justification is complete bullshit through dialogue. Because since the rules of the game demand it, we also have to put ourselves in the shoes of an all-mighty murderer and take our pick of the victim, only to be faced with the fact that there’s no right answer when we see our main characters develop through their interaction.
We’ve been talking about Adam and Lawrence’s dialectic here through the theme of justice, morality so far because this is the big explicit theme of the movie. It’s at least the one the sequels choose to highlight, although they don’t do it particularly well. But the nature of two opposing characters, especially ones so archetypical in their simplicity like Lawrence and Adam, is that they can represent a lot of very interesting things.
Sexuality
Now. Here my parasocial attachment to a certain Australian screenwriter puts some sticks in my wheels because as much as I love killing the author, this author is kind of my little funny guy. And it’s not like he’s homophobic, it’s just if I wrote myself a character that’s clearly a self-insert and then played him myself, I’d also feel some type of way when the people unanimously decided that his sexuality doesn’t match my own. He’s also a gen X-er that was kind of removed from the whole Twitter brand of discourse for most of the 2010s, so I can’t imagine how confusing it must be to come back to an army of teens with profile pictures of your face imposed on a pride flag.
That all being said, Adam very clearly reads as queer to me. Lawrence too.
I wrote a whole thing on this phenomenon, but frankly it’s a bloated confusing mess and I didn’t have a larger point than ‘Saw gay’ so I’m just going to summarize. Saw achieves a very interesting quality that can be described as queer queercoding. Importantly, this isn’t necessarily queercoding done by queer people, but a kind of queercoding that’s only immediately apparent to queer people. Like, you don’t need to explain to a cishet person why LeFou from that godawful Beauty and the Beast remake reads as gay, he talks funny, dresses fancy and follows his male best friend around for the whole runtime, but it might take them a minute to get why Li Shang and Mulan from the original Mulan read as bisexual for us enlightened ones.
Anyway, Saw does that through basically juxtaposing two bleak outcomes of queer life. Adam reads to me, personally, as a living type of queer guy. He’s snarky, likes alternative music and is into arts, even if that art is invading people’s privacy (come on these shots of Lawrence are Something), that ‘This is the most fun I’ve had without lubricant’ line sure warrants a side eye, but he’s also completely isolated and doesn’t cope in the best of ways. That cut line I mentioned earlier, the one showing that Adam doesn’t maintain contact with his family and his father was angry at him for whatever reason, that cuts deep when you remember the rates of LGBT youth being disowned by their parents and kicked out of their homes. This one’s less apparent, but his almost comical addiction to cigarettes also comes off differently when you realize just how much more likely queer people are to get addicted and abuse substances. And again I have to hark to The Scott Tibbs Documentary even though it’s outside the canon and the titular character only gets a passing mention in Saw because Adam describing Scott as his best friend while Scott clearly thinks of Adam as an annoying acquaintance is just… *gestures*. And it’s not even the only time Leigh Whannell pulls this shit, king, if you want people to stop interpreting your characters as gay you got to stop having your characters be attached at the hip to their male bestie. Back to the point. All of this put together reads to me like Adam is the symbol for the horrible consequences some queer people have to face when they come out: sure, now you’re free to live your truth or whatever, but you become othered, and it takes a great toll on you.
Lawrence, then, embodies the consequences of not coming out, of trying your best to conform into a heteronormative society and still feeling like shit. Lawrence very clearly loves and cherishes his daughter, but his relationship to the women in his life is… cold? Let’s go with that, cold. He doesn’t feel passion towards his wife, sure, that sometimes happens, people fall out of love, but then he willfully initiates an affair (to alleviate this lack of passion in life, one would assume) and yet it still looks like this relationship too is an unpleasant chore to him. At this point, I don't think there's anything wrong with these particular women, I think you have a problem with being attracted to women in general, man. This is so archetypical it’s almost a cliché - beautiful wife, children, a white picket fence, a nice job, and you still don’t feel entirely happy, you yearn for something intangible, your heart tingles when the mailman comes by in those little shorts of his… The point is, if Adam’s character speaks to a rarely explored in popular media reality of poor young queer people, Lawrence fits neatly into the archetype of closeted gay men in media. You can clock it just like that if you know what to look for.
So, it follows, the tensions between those two characters arise when those two propositions start clashing - do you come out and face the consequences or do you try to conceal it and basically live a lie as best as you can? And what happens when the moment comes when you have to face the music? Remember I made a big deal out of talking about how just before the climax of the movie, Lawrence and Adam were bonding and cooperating, and it seemed like both of them getting out was a possibility? That’s right, I don’t forget anything, everything is connected. In a world that locks you, a man, into a room with another man and asks you to shoot him, you can still make a conscious effort to hold his hand instead. It’s just going to take a toll on you. When under all that pressure Lawrence makes the choice to shoot Adam because after all he’s just some random guy, he’s nothing compared to Lawrence’s family, the safety of his daughter, and if the rules tell Lawrence to shoot him, then who’s Lawrence to break those rules? But Adam can’t help himself. He made a choice to be who he is a long time ago, so he plays dead until Zepp arrives and then gathers all his strength to batter that motherfucker to death to save both Lawrence and himself. And for a brief moment it seems like he triumphed, even though they are bleeding out they are safe, even though Lawrence betrayed Adam he now holds him close and promises to help him, they’re finally able to touch each other after spending the entirety of the movie apart. Synthesis.
But obviously then John has to get up and ruin the whole thing. Because you can’t trust another man unconditionally, how stupid were you to think you can find salvation in another man? That’s against the rules.
A movie about torture death traps doesn’t map onto the realities of queer life one to one, definitely, but I think it does touch a certain poetic truth. Doesn’t the patriarchy require men to be constantly at odds with each other and doesn’t homophobia pit queer people at different stages of their life against each other, almost like you’re put in a trap where you can only win at the expense of someone else? What do you do if you get involved with a closeted person who ultimately undermines you in favor of their heteronormative life? How do you react when you’re faced with someone who’s more free than you in a certain regard, do you antagonize them in self-defense or do you cooperate with them even though it’s the harder option? These are interesting questions and someone smarter than me could probably align them with Saw better than I tried to do here, but the gist of the matter is that saying Lawrence and Adam read as kind of fruity isn’t that new and fresh. Hell, the big studio itself has caught on and is now queerbaiting with characters that are either dead or absolutely won’t return to the franchise.
What I want to do is look at an interpretation of these characters that might be a little more… niche.
Class
Look, look, I’m doing leftist analysis, can I have my Breadtube card now please?
I already put some unsubtle emphasis on the fact that Lawrence has money and Adam doesn’t. And like, I don’t know, man, by this point the girls that get it, get it and the girls that don’t, don’t. Once again, this isn’t really an intended reading of the movie, but it fits surprisingly well.
Firstly, you can already tell I have some issues with Adam ending up in the trap in the first place, but I can’t say I’m surprised. No one’s need to eat should warrant being tortured and killed. Being a photographer is a very specific skill set which doesn’t apply easily to other areas of work, so if you can’t get a job shooting weddings or models because you’re a nobody, what else is there to do besides becoming a semi-legal PI? And, mind you, this is the early 2000s, you can’t just set up an Instagram account to show off your photography skills for any potential customers, the only similar way you’d achieve that then is by setting up a website and maintaining a domain costs money. Something someone who’s obviously lower class and estranged from their family doesn’t have. And being a vet, Adam’s other career prospect, doesn’t just have a grade barrier which he got spooked by, it has a financial one too, so once again, how mad can you be that Adam tried to make money the way he could? So right off the bat, it’s a real dick move saying a guy just trying to earn a living equates to defiling the sanctity of life itself.
But let’s see how this theme plays out in the trap itself, supposedly the great equalizer. From here on, my thoughts are more metaphorical rather than literal representations of class divide. An interesting thing most people either miss or forget while everything else happens is that right in the beginning, Adam actually wakes up submerged in a half-filled bathtub and there is a key to his chain floating in there, but when he wakes up drowning he obviously misses it, and it goes down the drain. It doesn’t get any mention until the very end, when we get a massive flashback and Adam realizes he’s doomed to stay chained in that room until he dies. This, for me, kind of encapsulates that argument capitalists make when they’re talking down to poor people about how they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. ‘The key to your salvation is right there, you just need to fish it out!’ while you’re drowning. And the key is getting sucked down the drain. A similar thing happens when Lawrence and Adam first find their hacksaws and try sawing through their chains, and Adam’s hacksaw breaks in the process. Now, in-narrative this is obviously framed as a coincidence because both of the saws are old and rusty and its utility is that this is how we get the final big scare that Adam has no chance to free himself, but come oooooooonnnnn. Two workers trying to break out of chains? And the poorer one’s tool to do so breaks? I know I’m not crazy, this sounds like a metaphor the big bearded man would use himself to describe the condition of capitalism. The result of this hilariously symbolical moment is that when push comes to shove, Lawrence is able to get away with just one leg short and Adam loses his life. Because this is the core truth, no one comes out of the capitalist slaughter machine completely unscathed, but while the rich and the middle-class might have to give up a single limb, the poor are not so lucky. And keep in mind I’m restraining myself only to the OG Saw here because as it turns out if you sacrifice a leg at the altar of capital, you really can go places from there. Maybe I’m losing some of you here but, man, I would have a field day with this interpretation if I could include the sequels. It’s got grifters, it’s got insurance peddlers, it’s got misguided neo-Nazi critique, it’s got both copaganda and ACAB moments, but none of that would’ve been possible if at least someone didn’t go ‘Hey, isn’t that fucked up that first guy got tortured just for trying to not die of poverty?’.
It’s also very telling that a suicide attempt and addiction also can be reason enough for ending up in a trap - both extremely common outcomes of poor material condition. And we can incorporate John as a character into all that, certainly there’s something to be said of how he clearly has enough money for all this shit and takes the bitterness about his impending death out on poor people, but I think ‘rich people torturing others’ is already a horror genre of its own, from Cadaver to Hunger Games, and looking at it systematically rather than through individual characters benefits this interpretation more.
So you know, even more than the heteronormative patriarchy pits men against each other, capitalism pits workers against each other. It’s literally a game of kill or be killed that was designed to ignore people’s inherent disadvantages, only worsen them, promote the worst qualities in humanity and if you win you get to live another day and if you lose… well.
The (Mis)judgement of Saw
Even if you agree with me even a little bit, the obvious reaction to all this would very understandably be: it’s Saw. It’s not that deep. And you know what? You’re right! It absolutely isn’t. In fact, this is probably one of the more deranged reasons to enjoy the movie, I just do this kind of reaching for my own sick enjoyment. You can always just put Saw on because it’s kind of a brilliant horror movie, it’s slow at times and very stream of conscious, but it crafts an atmosphere of discomfort and terror really well and even if I don’t agree with branding it as torture porn splatter extravaganza (MORE ON THAT LATER) the instances of violence are still very guttural and aid in making the movie terrifying. And if you don’t agree, hey, there’s room for you too, because it’s hilarious in enough places, intentional and not, it can also be thoroughly enjoyed as a comedy. I mean, they get electrocuted through their chains, and it’s basically an Australian and a Brit battling their accents trying to play Americans for an hour and a half.
The reason why I’m so insistent on giving Saw a chance in any department you’re willing to isn’t just because the pandemic rewired my brain and I watched it at the exact right time for it to call dibs on half of my neuron connections. The consensus on Saw just seems to lean too far to the negative side for my liking, since everyone can admit it was quite revolutionary for the genre, for better or for worse. Even horror fans don’t have a very high view of it, and people who don’t watch much horror think of it even less. I think I bent over backwards enough trying to prove that Saw is worth… something, at least, if not an Oscar. So it begs the question, why is Saw remembered so badly?
Serious answer
Horror is, or at least was at the time when Saw was released, considered a middle- to low-brow genre, good for nothing except cheap thrills and desensitizing basement-dwelling kids. They didn’t have A24 back then, Jordan Peele wasn’t making horror movies to convince the public that horror isn’t just for the mindless consumers but that it can be artsy high cinema, so no one paid much mind to whatever was happening in horror. And I’m not saying that there weren’t some excellent horror films that can rightfully be called art, it’s just the notion that they can hasn’t been exactly introduced to the entire public. Drama or comedy had the establishment and notoriety to be either good, bad or something in between, but if you were making a horror movie and wanted it to not only be considered a good horror movie, but a good film, period, you were looking at a long and difficult fight.
Saw is also slow and awkward and doesn’t have nearly as much gore as people remember, so it didn’t exactly stick in most horror fans’ minds either. It saw great box office success and gained a huge cult following, yeah, but it also was in that awkward stage of horror history where movies were experiencing growing pains, trying to move away from the campiness of the eighties and grunginess of the nineties, eventually growing into that polished, clean look that we associate with the late 2000s and 2010s horror. Don’t get me wrong, the early 2000s had some great thrills, but it is a very particular period where its overall identity wasn’t fully baked yet and that is very apparent in Saw, especially because its creators were literally looking for their creative identity as they were making it.
So this is my honest attempt at an objective take, now let’s get into the petty shit.
Saw itself
I love the Saw sequels with all my heart, but they’re hot steaming garbage. I like them because the characters are my tattered Barbies that I play with to make my brain produce serotonin, but objectively they are not good films. The original wanted to sort of combine Se7en and Cube by making a film about grisly murders that, for once, focuses on the victims and what they’re going through, their thought process, but the thing that sold the movie were the traps, so this is what we got for eighteen years now. I’d say you can still feel the remnants of that emotional core in II and III, the ones where James Wan and Leigh Whannell were still actively involved, but there’s still a bitter aftertaste, you can clearly feel the studio salivating at how much money they’re going to get from it. And the rest are really just a horse corpse being beaten in increasingly imaginative ways. If the original was really sympathetic to the victims, the sequels tend to delight in murder and completely forego fleshing out the victims as people. The original involved cops out of narrative necessity, and the sequels outright flirt with copaganda. Hell, Spiral doesn’t seem to decide if it thinks there are just a few bad apples or if all cops are actually bastards. Perhaps most insultingly, Leigh Whannell explicitly stated that while the franchise got as gruesome as it can, he didn’t want to write over-the-top violence against women into the story and then, right after he departed from the franchise, they made one of Saw IV trap victims a rapist, showed images of the battered women he abused and a video of the crime happening. To be fair and balanced, Whannell has a bumpy record of handling the subject of sexual assault in his writing himself, and those scenes were clearly included so you don’t feel bad for the fucking rapist when he dies. And to be even more fair and balanced, I think asking ‘Hey, I don’t want my movie that’s already about to overflow with gratuitous violence to exacerbate the kind of horror women experience in their actual lives’ is not an unreasonable request and if that doesn’t show how much the sequels made all the wrong changes to the original, then I don’t know what does.
Up until 2010, a new Saw movie was coming out every year. Accounting for how long it takes to shoot, edit and release a movie, this really speaks of how quickly they were written, which I’m guessing had some impact on their quality. It’s also a revolving goddamn door with directors and writers starting from Saw III, which also probably didn’t help. From the point of view of the audience, I can really imagine the fatigue that started to set in right around the fourth one. The same damn thing is starting to happen with the MCU, but clearly big studios haven’t learned anything because we’re getting Saw X and potentially a TV show soon in the future. Its timeline also got so garbled with each new installment, the MCU comparison really hits the nail on the head, and I’m anxious to see if they go the objectively better Spiral route or try to build on the already crumbling timeline of the first seven. Saw, the 2004 movie, is a subversive, fun horror staple. Saw, the franchise, is a testament to human hubris, corporate greed and the slow death of creativity.
Hostel (and Co.)
But it wasn’t just Lionsgate executives who got greedy. With the success of Saw, splatter and exploitation cinema were back in vogue, baby, and everybody wanted a slice of that pie. The first one was Eli Roth and Hostel. He wasn’t the only one, he was just the one that half-assedly copied the homework answers and then handed them out to the rest of the class, so everybody failed the test in the end. If he was like two years late and Captivity came out earlier, it would be drawing most of my ire right now.
Because, much like Saw’s own sequels, these movies either didn’t understand or they didn’t care that Saw had more going on behind the curtain and only had ten minutes of graphic violence in its hour and a half run time. In fact, Roth doesn’t seem very much aware that themes and ideas can be implicitly present in movies at all, since Hostel’s whole plot consists of red-cheeked American students travelling to spooky scary Eastern Europe that’s apparently overrun with criminals, and he defended it by saying "Americans do not even know that [Slovakia] exists. My film is not a geographical work but aims to show Americans' ignorance of the world around them” and didn’t see anything ironic about that statement. As it’s apparent from everything about me, I’m Eastern European myself, so I might be a bit biased here, but still, Hostel is a far cry from the meditation on justice and duality Saw wanted to achieve.
Similar flicks flooded the horror market, you couldn’t go a goddamn year without a new Saw copycat getting banned from theaters for its excessive violence, until they all eventually petered out by the end of the decade. I’m not going to say that all the movies that came out of the splatter revival Saw induced were bad, Martyrs is one of the best gruesome movies I’ve ever seen, but that’s more of a testament to how it uses violence meaningfully. The cinemas were just saturated with films either inspired by or directly ripping off Saw. Between them and Saw sequels, the original just kind of got lost in the noise. There was just too much of the same thing, so you can’t really blame the average person for equating Saw with the likes of Hostel. Who you can blame though are…
The critics
On release, Saw received mixed reviews, and its score on Rotten Tomatoes eventually evened out into an almost 50%. This is understandable, there’s a lot to like about Saw, but there’s also a lot to hate. Even I’m not crazy enough to say Saw should have an 80% approval rating or something. Critics generally seemed sympathetic to the commendable efforts of the first time filmmakers. They honed in on whether the mystery elements were successful or not, Saw’s ability to scare was also a focus, but not the sole one. The consensus was a very resounding ‘meh, good enough for a debut’. Even big dog R.E. gave it a generally okay review, so here you go film bros, your God has spoken, and he said Saw is literally just fine.
Enter my arch-nemesis, David Edelstein. I don’t know why I hate David so much, it could be his very New Yorker Magazine writing style, it could be that he calls himself a ‘horror maven’ but got upset at a film for featuring too much gore for his liking, or it could be that the label for those movies he invented is stupid. That’s right, I’ve avoided saying it up until now, even though you were probably thinking it and our boy David was the one to come up with it - torture porn. I fucking hate that label so much, and not only because Edelstein inexplicably included The Temptation of Christ under it. Like, I haven’t seen The Temptation of Christ, they could be whipping my boy JC to pulp there every scene, but still… *gestures*. Firstly, Edelstein is trying to describe splatter and exploitation cinema in his original article, two already established horror subgenres that really don’t need a name more controversial than they already have. Second of all, Edelstein seems strangely indignant at the fact that some at the time new horror movies include excessive violence, even though he explicitly mentions eighties flicks. Cannibal Holocaust came out in 1980 and was a hit, so it’s pretty absurd to claim that the ‘new stuff’ is breaching some previously untouched ground in making gory, but ultimately lacking in wider meaning flicks. Thirdly, he seems to imply excessive violence is always detrimental to the overall quality of a movie. Saló is a film that is extraordinarily gratuitous with its filth and violence, but claiming that it has no deep-cutting meaning would be disingenuous. Sure, I threw up in my mouth both times I watched it, but Saló makes a poignant argument about unchecked fascism’s escalating level of evil and how it corrupts the soul to its deepest depths. I also already mentioned Martyrs and expressing its message would also literally be impossible without insane amounts of violence and pain. Violence is a filmmaking ingredient like any other: some don’t need it, some need it in moderation, and for some it’s the base for the entire dish. Also, seeing that Edelstein cites the American post-9/11 thirst for blood as the reason for this high gory horror output, maybe he should check whether he could apply that torture porn label to any of the countless war movies that were coming out in the USA in that climate rather than intellectualizing the wave of people trying to imitate two Australian guys who envisioned the whole thing before 9/11 even happened.
And you know what, this all would’ve been fine by me if Edelstein was just a New Yorker Mag columnist who didn’t like Hostel when it came out, but unfortunately he retroactively roped Saw into it and the torture porn label stuck to the point where any horror movie that dares to show some gore now gets it tacked on regardless of whether the violence is utilized well or not. And let me remind you some things about Saw: ten minutes of graphic violence in total, and doesn’t even show us the money shot of Lawrence’s foot coming off. But it still got locked in because of Hostel’s fault, and I bet its sequels’ lack of brains didn’t help either.
See? These three actors are working in tandem. Saw earns money, spawns a million sequels and copycats, critics get mad and that distaste eventually trickles back down to the source. The mission statement of Saw was to empathize with the victims of violence, but culturally we remember it as the biggest source of violent media in recent genre history. These are the three things that have and still continue to drive Saw’s legacy into the ground. Is it deserved? I mean, there can’t be smoke without any fire, Saw certainly had these very imagination-stirring instances of violence that kick-started the whole torture porn craze, but isn’t it a shame? Its flaws got blown out of proportion so badly you can’t disassociate it from all the baggage, while its better qualities seem to be almost completely forgotten. Friday the 13th and Halloween are still marching on and, sure, the people are complaining about the remakes and the copycats but every so often we stop and pay our dues to just how great the originals of these franchises were and, for all of its cultural impact, that doesn’t really happen with Saw.
Conclusion
Ultimately, why does this all matter? I suppose I’m a film optimist or whatever you wanna call it, I hate rating movies I watch lower than three stars out of five, and I like meeting every movie halfway. Also, being a contrarian is very fun, you should try it sometime.
I tried to avoid the ‘popular thing good’ fallacy as much as I could, but the truth is that I really believe Saw tapped into something very raw and real and this is why audiences flooded the theaters in 2004 to see a cheaply produced, rough around the edges debut of, at the time, two complete nobodies. I also think James Wan and Leigh Whannell carried on these qualities into their very successful careers, I can draw a straight line from Saw to Insidious and The Invisible Man of them always working to sympathize with victims of horrible events and find some parallels between make-believe horror scenarios and real life and I think this is why people keep coming to see their movies.
I have a lot to say on the sequels but nothing as serious as my opinions here, I already said I don’t think very highly of them. If anyone cares, my ranking goes like this: I, II, III, then 3D, Spiral, V, IV and VI. Jigsaw is not on this list because Jigsaw isn’t a movie, it’s a circle of hell reserved for me specifically if I don’t watch my step and don’t fix my sin score, The Good Place style, before I die. I’ve watched most of Leigh Whannell’s creative output in a kind of manic haze, so I also have a lot to say about those movies and how they compare to Saw, but I think I already showed my ass enough about how much this silly little man captured my entire being. I think James Wan’s movies are fine. He’s a very good director in the visual department, but I like my movies to have a story to chew on, and except for Leigh he doesn’t really pick screenwriters to match his visual extravaganza with story. Malignant was good though, and anyone who disagrees is going into a Saw trap.
A lot of horror movies received fresh reappraisals recently, Jennifer’s Body is a good example. But Jennifer’s Body was always kind of a niche cult classic while Saw bears all the baggage of blowing up way more than anyone expected, so it’s very hard to disconnect it from that legacy and unpack it while staying unbiased. But someone really should and if that someone has to be me, then so fucking be it, I’ll bring this cursed knowledge from the depths of Tumblr into the light: Saw is good.
Die mad about it.
Bibliography
Leigh Whannell Defined A Decade of Horror, And He’s Not Done (vulture.com)
Saw (2004) Cary Elwes, Leigh Whannell, and James Wan Commentary (Huge thanks to Kora @ispyspookymansion on Tumblr for archiving this and many more horror movie commentaries. The link to the complete folder is on his blog)
Cary Elwes Talks MI:7, Princess Bride, Saw, Glory and Twister (The Hollywood Reporter)