Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Emily Maesar, Associate Editor, TVJawn

“Dr. Gordon, I want to play a game…”

Sometimes film school is the fire that forges lifelong friendships and working relationships. As was the case with James Wan and Leigh Whannell, the two Australian filmmakers who created the Saw franchise and ushered in a new brand of horror filmmaking in the early 2000s. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Like all good, bad, and mediocre horror films made after 1999 (i.e., all of them), Saw was born from the success of The Blair Witch Project. Because if you’re a filmmaker who wants to make horror films in a post-Blair Witch world, you’re either trying to emulate an element that worked or you’re trying to refute it. Either way, ultimately when a film does that well with the kind of budget that Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez had, there are bound to be young filmmakers who look at it and say, “I can do that!”

So, James Wan and Leigh Whannell decide they want to make something. Wan pitches the general concept to Whannell, coming off the idea of films like Darren Aronofsky's Pi, where the majority of the film is two people in a single location. They needed something cheap, the concept they were largely pulling from Blair Witch, but found their angle in limited locations. The base idea was there, with the “guy” in the middle of the room being the answer to the questions the main characters have about why they’re trapped in this bathroom. Barebones, sure, but it’s the skeleton from which Jigsaw hangs.

The idea of who that random guy in the middle of the bathroom was, though, didn’t come until Leigh Whannell was convinced he had a brain tumor and thought about the terror of being told you’re going to die. Obviously, John Kramer’s reaction (becoming Jigsaw) is not a normal one, but it was interesting enough and it has lived at the center of almost every Saw film since the conception of the franchise. We’ll circle back to that, though, because Kramer, and therefore actor Tobin Bell, is the beating heart of this series and certainly why it lived on after Wan and Whannell left the franchise.

But okay, what is Saw? Like, really? Well, it’s not actually torture porn, despite what poisonous fruits have since grown in its orchard. Instead, the original Saw is much more of a mystery. Two guys wake up in a dirty bathroom. They’re chained to pipes, have no way out, and, oh, there’s a dead dude in the middle of the room who seems to have blown his brains out. As time passes, Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannell) slowly begin to uncover the clues left by Jigsaw, including the titular saws, lots of mini cassette tapes, and a cell phone dated to the day before 9/11 (which, many people would note, is likely not the actual date of the events, but it has become fan lore, regardless). All of which are clues about why they’re there, items telling them how they might escape, and confirmation of what their ultimate fates would be if they choose not to play the game.

However, unlike the original pitch, the film does have life outside of the bathroom. There’s a parallel plot happening where Dr. Gordon’s wife and daughter have been kidnapped by a man you’re led to believe is Jigsaw (but is actually Zep, played by Michael Emerson). Plus, you have flashbacks from both Lawrence and Adam as they try to remember how they got here—including Dr. Gordon being investigated by Detective Tapp (Danny Glover) and Detective Sing (Ken Leung), who believe he might be the Jigsaw killer. This includes our introduction to Amanda (Shawnee Smith) who escaped the infamous reverse bear trap.

It was a contraption originally worn by writer Leigh Whannell in the short film, Saw 0.5, that they made to complete the pitch packet after Whannell finished the script for Saw. The short film sees Whannell as David, instead of Adam, a man who works at a hospital, but is a smoker and is seen as being “ungrateful” for his life because of it (a common refrain from Jigsaw). Like Amanda after him, David survives the reverse bear trap and is forever changed by the experience.

The short film was Wan and Whannell’s proof-of-concept for the feature. It was also a way for them to market themselves as being truly part of the project, should it get bought. Wan said of the short film that, “Leigh and I just loved the project so much and we wanted a career in filmmaking, so we stuck to our guns and said, 'Look, guys, if you want this project, we're coming on board—Leigh has to act in it and I have to direct it.’” Which worked!

Shot in just over two weeks and with a budget of roughly $1 million, Saw became a breakout hit. The rights for distribution were bought by Lionsgate just a few days before it premiered at Sundance in 2004 to a packed audience not once, not twice, but three times in a row. After its reception at Sundance and as the closing film at TIFF that year, Lionsgate decided to rethink their initial plan to release the film direct-to-video. When it opened Halloween weekend, it was in the top three highest grossing films for that week, making $18.2 million. The franchise, as a whole, has made over $1 billion, but largely saw its success where many horror films do: on home video.

The twist in Saw has become immortalized in horror. Mixed with the iconic score by Charlie Clouser, including the twist song “Hello Zepp” (which incorrectly spells the character’s name), there are few moments that hit harder in modern horror. The twist, of course, is that the man they thought was dead in the center of the bathroom is actually Jigsaw, as played by the immaculate Tobin Bell. The later films would expand his backstory and ideology, making him equal parts emotionally devastating and deranged. Additionally, the Saw bathroom set, itself, has become iconic. (It’s also still, apparently, standing and used for storage, which I find so funny.) It’s often said that it’s not a real Saw movie if we don’t see the bathroom from the first one and some version of Adam’s body.

Because Adam suffers from what we might call “being doomed by the narrative,” which is what makes his fate so horrible. At the beginning of the film, when Adam wakes up in the bathtub, he accidentally yanks out the plug and the key that was left with his body is flushed down the drain without his knowledge. So, when Gordon finally saws off his foot to escape, Adam is the only one left to witness John Kramer. When he’s told his escape should be a key in the bathtub, he realizes he’s truly stuck and cannot escape. We get Adam’s iconic scream as Jigsaw closes the bathroom door, plunging us (and Adam) back into the darkness we started the film in.

But what’s John Kramer’s deal, anyway? Over the course of the last ten films (but really only nine, since Spiral is kind of its own thing), the man who started all of this terror has been at the center. And that center is kind of a lawful evil vibe. Having been told, with shocking little care, by Dr. Gordon that he was going to die, Kramer took it upon himself to act as an angel of death to those who he viewed as “wasting” their lives. “Ungrateful” is a word often thrown around in his monologues. James Wan and Leigh Whannell worked on the first three films before leaving the franchise, and the ending of Saw III has the death of John Kramer. However, death is not the end, as many long-running horror franchises know all too well.

For Saw, this is because Jigsaw has apprentices. Within the Wan and Whannell films, it’s limited to Amanda, whose life he changed with her trap. After the two left the franchise…well, it’s kind of become a joke that everybody who survives becomes an apprentice for Jigsaw and they carry out his plans even after his death. Including, spoiler alert for Saw 3D (aka Saw: The Final Chapter), Dr. Gordon. What Kramer’s death means is that he survives in flashbacks, largely, including full prequel films like Saw X. Also, because by the end of the first film Dr. Gordon is presumed dead and Adam is definitely dead, Kramer becomes the beating heart of the franchise. Tobin Bell and Jigsaw’s puppet Billy, who rides around on a tricycle because it's goofy and funny, are the only constants of the series. It’s through Bell’s performances in the series that we come to understand Jigsaw’s work—the good and the bad.

But what about that torture porn legacy? Well, there’s no denying that those are the fruits of Saw’s lasting influence, and while the first film is largely a mystery with horror, it’s true that eventually (and kind of quickly) the Saw franchise did fall into the torture porn category. Even some of the traps Wan and Whannell made in the first three films could very easily be seen this way. And it’s obvious that we don’t get things like Damien Leone’s Terrifier series without the success of Saw, however you might feel about those films. Saw didn’t begin “extreme horror,” but it gave it a more mainstream foundation. There’s always a shift in horror during political upheaval, and I think it’s obvious that we, as an American public, were primed for this kind of horror, considering what America was doing overseas.

Like I often talk about with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the biggest influence Saw had on horror was what came after, both the movies that were inspired by the film and the work its creators did later. We got the Insidious franchise, a joint effort between Wan and Whnanell, the universe of The Conjuring from James Wan, and Leigh Whannell’s very successful reboot of the Universal Monster movies with his reimagining of The Invisible Man in 2020 and his upcoming Wolf Man film. Plus, Wan was largely responsible for bringing back B-movie weirdo horror to the mainstream with Malignant. All of which is to say that, even outside of the success of Saw, James Wan and Leigh Whannell are eternally influential. Not only are they making things, but their close collaborators are too. Like Malignant writer Akela Cooper, who went on to create the successful M3GAN series, or Conjuring spin-off writer Gary Dauberman, who went on to co-write the recent It movies.

The Saw franchise has spanned twenty years and currently has ten films in it, but there’s nothing quite like the original film from 2004. It’s nihilistic and brutal, with one of the great twists of our lifetime. If you’ve ever seen the film in a packed theater for a revival, then it becomes clear why Saw is so magnetic. It was fresh and original at the time of its release and remains this perfect time capsule of what we were hoping to see from horror filmmaking in the early 2000s. Besides, there’s nothing better than watching two non-American guys fighting for their lives to do American accents, all while throwing things around a dirty bathroom with the dexterity of three-year-olds.