The thing that made the Saw franchise popular is also what ruined it
I find the Saw franchise to be absolutely fascinating. Few horror franchises — well, strike that, few film franchises — get as many installments as Saw has (10, with this year’s release), and those that do tend to have fewer thoughts at the center of them. I love a good slasher as much as the next gal, but let’s not pretend that Freddy or Jason ever had more going on than high body counts. I’m not pretending Saw is high-quality cinema, or anything, but it did have something to say, once upon a time.
The first Saw was far more simple than the sequels it spawned. The majority of it is a conversation between two men being held captive in a decrepit bathroom. Other traps are featured, but only in passing and they’re pretty lo-fi; one guy has to work his way through a maze made of razor wire before a door locks. Another needs to use a candle to search a room covered in flammable material. So, yeah, they’re potentially (ok, almost certainly) deadly, but also the kind of thing that a highly-driven person could actually make. The traps of the later films? I’m not sure most of them obey the laws of physics, let alone common sense, finance, or engineering.
But the traps aren’t the point of the first Saw; what’s being asked of the two men in the bathroom is. Their predicament is so basic you can’t even call it a “trap”: One of their ankles is shackled to a pipe, so all they need to do to escape is saw off their feet. It’s not tricky or multi-step; there’s no thematic connection between what they need to do and their “crime.” Take this $20 hacksaw and saw through your own flesh and bone…or don’t. It’s entirely up to you. Live or die. Make your choice. Its very simplicity is what makes it so truly horrifying.
What adds an extra layer to the story — and why I’m so disappointed by the direction the series inevitably took — is why they’re locked up in the first place. Franchise antagonist John Kramer (Jigsaw) has terminal cancer and he is pissed. He’s angry that he’s dying, of course, but he’s more angry at people who aren’t. He sees people wasting the gift of being alive — doing drugs, cheating on their spouses, going through each day generally miserable over nothing — and the injustice of it infuriates him.
In that rage he finds his calling. He will select people who are taking the life they have for granted, and he will give them an opportunity to truly appreciate it. He’ll put them unthinkable situations, but give them the ability to survive so long as they’re willing to sacrifice and suffer. Should they come out the other side, he theorizes, they’ll come to cherish what they have but he does not: a second chance at life.
As motivations for horror movie bad guys go, that’s a fantastic one, because you can totally see where he’s coming from. Every single one of us has witnessed the unfairness of life in action; this great person gets struck down by cancer when they’re not yet 40, while this other trashbag of a human lives into their 70s. And while we’re probably not going to lock someone in a room and make them hack off a limb in the hopes it makes them realize what a gift it is to be alive, we can empathize with the urge to.
I’m not saying John Kramer isn’t a monster. I’m just saying that unlike the killers in other long-running horror franchises, he possesses a distinct and recognizable humanity. He gives you something to think about besides how many stab wounds it takes to actually kill a person or why Jason never runs but always manages to catch up to people.
So how do we get from that to the crassness of a “love triangle” being worked out via table saw while a crowd looks on? I mean, just look at this shlock (or don’t, it’s dumb and bloody):
Well, to understand that, you need to go back to Shawnee Smith’s junkie character Amanda and the reverse bear trap. That’s her in the video posted at the top of this blog. Amanda serves a crucial function in the first Saw movie: She proves that Jigsaw genuinely provides an opportunity for his victims to escape. She did what was asked and lived to tell the tale. She also didn’t just escape, she came out changed. Extreme as it may be, Jigsaw’s “therapy” works. (Let’s put aside for a moment that the price she paid wasn’t really aligned with Jigsaw’s core ethos. She has to carve the key that unlocks the trap out of another person’s stomach; the suffering is therefore not her own.)
But handwave that because the reverse bear trap is undeniably cool. Just look at the thing. You can practically feel the weight of it on your head. And while it’s much more complex than anything else Jigsaw designed in the first film, it’s still within the realm of “yeah, someone could make this.” But the best thing about the RBT is that we don’t see it go off. We see it snap open in the corner, we know how she was wearing it, and our imagination can put two and two together, but its threat stays implied.
And Smith sells the scene like the rent’s due, her eyes wide with terror and frantic determination. All of the traps in the first Saw have a time limit associated with them, but the RBT has by far the fastest. No time to think. Live or die. Make your choice. It’s a thrilling sequence of what was, at the time, an innovative idea, so naturally it got huge buzz. From that point on, whatever else it was about or had to say, for many people “Saw” became synonymous with “Traps.”
And so the next film made sure to have plenty of fiendish traps. And the next one had even more. And they became more elaborate and bloody and absurd, because of course you have to top the last film or else audiences will be disappointed. And maybe they would’ve been, or maybe executives just assumed they would’ve been. Either way, the result was the same: more, more, more.
Of course, while this was happening, the franchise was dealing with a whole other problem. Remember why Jigsaw is doing this in the first place? He’s dying. Well, isn’t that a pickle? Can’t cure him, because he wouldn’t waste his precious life punishing others, he’d get busy with the business of living. Can’t just have him lingering on, because, again, his motivation was that he had very little time left. Can’t stop making Saw films because capitalism. What does that leave? A hot mess, is what.
The franchise did, eventually, kill off John Kramer because it had no other choice, and it never really came up with a good successor. They tried a few different options and the results were…well, frankly, they were dumb. The ex-wife did it. The ex-cop did it. The disciple did it. The other disciple did it. The other ex-cop did it. None of them had a motivation as compelling as the original Jigsaw’s, and it showed. Without a strong central character, the sequels leaned more and more on those attention-grabbing traps and became more boring in the process. Oh, someone else is being dissolved in acid? Ok. *shrug*
To be fair, there were sparks of creativity in the many Saws that followed. In one, Jigsaw targets a guy who’s lying about being a survivor so he can make a fortune on the self-help/book circuit. In another, the victims in the game will all survive relatively unscathed if they just cooperate with each other. In another, the two plots — the victims in the game and the cops trying to find them — are actually happening 10 years apart. But those brief moments simply can’t stand up to the onslaught of exhaustingly absurd death machines. Seriously, who is making these? Where are they sourcing their materials? How is nobody stumbling across them in the middle of major cities? Some of these traps are one mutant shark away from being Resident Evil rooms. It’s ridiculous.
And, ok, sure, maybe most people don’t really need a story, or for the antagonist to have a compelling reason to torment people. It’s Halloween and they just want blood and guts. That’s totally valid, I just wish they were getting it from any one of the other countless horror films that are happy to do that and only that. But few of those movies have the budget of a Saw film or actually make it to the local cineplex, and let’s be honest: The Halloween-only horror fan doesn’t feel like putting much effort into seeking them out. I get it. I understand everything that conspired to turn an indie hit into a money-printing franchise. It just really bums me out.
If you’ve never seen any of the Saw franchise, give the original a go this Halloween. It’s much lower-rent than you’d expect, and to be fair, Danny Glover is terrible in it (it was an extremely fast shoot), but I bet you’ll be surprised by it.