James Wan’s Saw turns 20 this year and is back in cinemas. A look at one of the most influential horror films of all time:
There’s a comparitively small group of horror films that have, one way or another, changed the genre. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Night Of The Living Dead, The Blair Witch Project and Psycho have all left their mark, but more recent films aren’t always considered to be as impactful as the genre’s older offerings.
Yet, today’s horror landscape would look very different without James Wan’s Saw, which debuted in cinemas in October 2004 and recently returned to UK cinemas to mark its 20th anniversary. Saw kickstarted the so-called torture porn subgenre of horror along with Eli Roth’s Hostel, but it also brought in a whole new approach to the genre. What if the killer wasn’t just sadistic, but also had a compelling – even moralistic – motivation for his crimes?
You probably already know that the entire franchise, which currently has 10 entries and has an 11th due out in 2025, follows a killer called Jigsaw. Except, technically, Jigsaw – real name: John Kramer, a terminally ill, rather bitter man – never directly kills anyone. He simply places his victims – whom he believes don’t appreciate their lives enough – in deadly traps that most of them never make it out of.
Iconic Saw murder machines include the Reverse Bear Trap, The Angel Wings and The Rack. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
It all started with a short film. In the early-2000s, few had heard of James Wan or Leigh Whannell, recent film school graduates from Australia, but the two had the idea of making a film about two men trapped in a bathroom. After Wan and Whannell found it hard to find funding for their script, they opted to make a short film instead.
That short film, usually referred to as Saw 0.5, features Whannell as a man who wakes up in a Reverse Bear Trap. If you’re wondering what the Reverse Bear Trap does, the clue is in the name: take a basic bear trap, and instead of it closing, it springs the other way – in this case, on your face. Sounds lovely, right?
The short was sent to producers along with the script, and soon enough, Mark Burg and Oren Koules offered the duo the chance to make a feature. Wan and Whannell received offers from bigger studios, such as DreamWorks, but they weren’t willing to give up their involvement in order to sell the script.
Lionsgate quickly picked up the distribution rights after the Saw short had a successful, buzzy premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. The Saw feature was eventually made with a budget of roughly $1 million and made over $100 million at the global box office, making it one of the most profitable horror films in the history of the genre.
It sees Cary Elwes and Whannell play, respectively, Dr Gordon and Adam, who are chained up on opposite ends of a bathroom with a dead man lying between them. They’re then informed that they’re part of Jigsaw’s game and that they have a fair chance of making it out alive – if they play by his rules.
While Adam and Dr Gordon try to figure their way out of the bathroom, we also follow two detectives investigating Jigsaw’s previous murders. There’s only one survivor, Amanda (played by Shawnee Smith), who managed to escape the aforementioned Reverse Bear Trap by retrieving the key from the stomach of an unconscious man lying on the floor.
It’s exactly that gnarly, gross yet endlessly fascinating streak of cruelty that turned Saw from a little horror indie to a cult classic. Later films would get increasingly gory, but the first entry is barely a horror film and plays out more like a tense thriller.
Saw wasn’t the first of its kind, of course. It shares much in common with David Fincher’s Seven (1995) and Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997), but its legacy (at least in terms of franchise filmmaking) is more long-lasting than either of those. It launched the careers of both Wan and Whannell, and inspired such franchises as The Collector series.
There’s also the dark, grimy look of Saw that feels like an evolution of the handheld look of The Blair Witch Project, which came out five years earlier, and considerably different from the glossier studio horrors of the early 2000s. You come out of watching Saw feeling physically dirty and you can almost smell the cold, filthy bathroom Adam and Dr Gordon are trapped in. It’s not a very nice smell either.
It’s the implied violence, however, that stands out about Saw. We see little of the traps, but their effect is certainly felt. Wan has previously said the franchise took on a life of its own after the original movie, and that the traps were never the focal point for he and Whannell.
“I felt people ended up concentrating on certain things that were not necessarily, for us, what the film was about, like the blood and guts of the trap,” Wan told The AV Club in 2010. “I keep reminding people that the reason why I think the first film works so well was because it was fresh, it was unique, and it had a really cool twist ending that made people say, “My God, did you see that?” And I felt some of that was kind of lost in the process.”
The twist ending of Saw has become somewhat legendary. We won’t spoil it here, given it’s back in cinemas for a new generation of movie-goers to enjoy, but it’s safe to say it ranks among the most effective in the genre.
Even after 20 years, Saw remains not just the best Saw film, but also one of the best horror-thrillers of all time – and a small miracle of independent filmmaking. It’s every filmmaker’s dream: fight for your idea, get it made and see its legacy grow. With Saw XI to look forward to, there’s undoubtedly more John Kramer still to come.
