“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw.”
Saw had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004, followed by its theatrical release on October 29. From 2004 to 2010, horror fans lined up for the next installment in the franchise, which hit theaters every October. After a seven-year hiatus, the seventh film, Jigsaw, came out in 2017, followed by Spiral: From the Book of Saw in 2021, and the most recent Saw X, released in September 2023.
While the next chapter, Saw XI, doesn’t come out until September 2025, there’s still something to celebrate. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first film, so let’s celebrate by looking back to the film that started it all.
Some spoilers ahead for the Saw franchise…
PIN ITInspired by 1999’s found footage classic The Blair Witch Project, Australian filmmakers James Wan (The Conjuring universe) and Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) set out to make their own low-budget horror film set in a single room with few characters. These restrictions helped Wan think of the initial concept of two strangers trapped in a bathroom with a corpse lying between them, which evolved into the premise of their feature film debut.
Saw begins with photographer Adam (Leigh Whannell) and Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) waking up in a pitch-black room. Lawrence turns on the blinding fluorescent lights, revealing they’re chained to opposite sides of a large, disgusting bathroom with a dead body lying in a puddle of blood between them. Each finds a microcassette tape addressed to them and when played, a menacing voice tells them what’s up (sort of).
PIN ITLawrence’s tape is detailed, condemning him for being the bearer of bad news as a doctor and telling him to kill Adam by 6:00 or his wife and daughter die. Adam’s tape is incredibly vague; the voice criticizes the voyeuristic nature of his job, calls him pathetic, and gives him the option of “watch yourself die” or “do something about it.”
While most of the film takes place in this one room, we get flashbacks to detectives David Tapp (Danny Glover) and Steven Sing (Ken Leung) working on the case of the Jigsaw killer (Tobin Bell). They’ve been to multiple bizarre crime scenes where a deceased victim has seemingly died in elaborate obstacles like a man who failed to escape a cage filled with razor wire.
PIN ITListening to the tapes left for each victim, we can piece together that this anonymous tormentor wants people to quit committing bad deeds, whether they’re to others or themselves. In Jigsaw’s twisted logic, these nearly unbeatable traps test their will to live, forcing them to physically harm themselves in some way within a time limit. The ideal outcome is that they’ll survive and finally appreciate their lives.
Tapp interviews Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), a survivor who managed to escape the now iconic reverse bear trap before it could rip her jaw open. To Jigsaw, her crime was being a drug addict and ungrateful for living. She credits the unseen captor with helping her get clean.
The back-and-forth between Amanda’s interview and her harrowing near-death experience plays out the same in Wan and Whannell’s short film they made in 2003. It’s Adam who has to break out of the reverse bear trap, a somewhat different version of the character that we see in the film, more of an amalgamation of Amanda, Adam, and Zep (Michael Emerson), one of Jigsaw’s victims whose game was to capture and potentially kill Dr. Gordon’s family.
PIN ITThe short also gave a glimpse of what would become Saw’s visual language that’s similar to the grimy feel of Seven. The camera does a 360 around the victim with flash frames, quick cuts, and metal music, like a nu-metal music video. It’s chaotic and disorienting, conveying the absolute terror of trying to escape the contraption. The small budget meant limited time and resources but it created the grunge aesthetic that mostly stayed consistent in the sequels. Charlie Clouser (American Horror Story), the former member of Nine Inch Nails, also provided the instantly recognizable, ominous score.
While Saw is often credited as kicking off the “torture porn” era, the film isn’t nearly as gory as we remember. Dr. Gordon sawing off his foot and Amanda rifling through guts for a key are easily the goriest parts. Everything else is mostly implied. Still, Wan and Whannell were lumped in with what was dubbed the “splat pack,” a group of filmmakers known for ultra-violent horror films, which included Eli Roth (Hostel), Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses), Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes), Neil Marshall (The Descent), Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II–IV), Greg McLean (Wolf Creek), and Robert Rodriguez (Planet Terror).
PIN ITSaw II premiered exactly one year after its predecessor, this time with director Darren Lynn Bousman at the helm, who co-wrote the script with Whannell. With each sequel, the mythology of Jigsaw expands (real name John Kramer). In the first film, we heard his voice more than we actually saw him, and when we did see him, his face was usually obscured by the hood of his warlock fit or by blood when he was pretending to be dead in that bathroom.
Part of its “torture porn” label stems from the sequels, which focused more heavily on elaborate traps and plot twists than characterization. In a 2010 interview with The AV Club, Whannell said, “I think the sequels have retrospectively tainted that first film with the impression that that’s what the film is about.”
PIN ITOne thing that became somewhat clearer in the sequels is the reason why certain people were chosen to be in traps: various criminals, corrupt law enforcement, predatory lenders. However, they also tried to make too many connections to past characters. The original’s nonlinear structure made the mystery more interesting and harder to solve.
By Saw IV, at least, the continuity was all over the place with convoluted, overlapping narratives that played out like soap operas. The increasing number of new and old characters who are revealed to be Jigsaw minions and/or protégés gets pretty ridiculous, especially when motives make no sense.
The first film isn’t perfect but its simplicity still made an impact. The final shot of Adam screaming as Jigsaw shuts the bathroom door, essentially locking him inside a tomb, is still one of the most chilling scenes I’ve ever experienced.
PIN ITSaw is a mystery thriller as much as it is a psychological horror with a morality tale at its core, though often mistaken for pure exploitation cinema. The influential film established James Wan and Leigh Whannell as masters of their craft and led to one of the most successful horror franchises in history. While the sequels amped up the graphic violence, the OG’s gritty, contained nature will always stand out among its successors.
All eight Saw films (including Spiral) are available to stream on Max and Peacock.
