Saw and Hostel are both cultural nadir incarnate. What I mean by that is that most people have a preconceived notion of both series based on what they’ve been told about them.
They’re the poster children for the ‘torture porn’ sub-genre, which tends to be classified as inherently misogynistic and excessively violent. By consequence, both Lionsgate series are often dismissed as pure exploitation and nothing more. Some folks in the horror community even refer to them as ‘bro horror.’
But when viewed today, it’s difficult to just write either series or their numerous imitators off as, well, just that.
The boom of torture porn came at a time when American youth were being heavily propagandized to. We knew that bad things were going on in the world and couldn’t avoid learning about it. Every time we watched TV, turned on the radio, saw a magazine cover, we were exposed to a new atrocity either at home or abroad. But it was only ever an abstract version of it – blurred, pixelated, or just mentioned.
2004’s Saw offered a chance to see torture up close and personal. That said, the torture wasn’t the original selling point. Early marketing pitched it as a gristly psychological thriller in the vein of Se7en, and at heart, that’s not far from the mark. It’s easy to forget that – in spite of the series’ gorehound reputation – the first entry is a fairly restrained film. There are some nasty bits to be sure, and it’s definitely a good deal more extreme than most psychological thrillers. But the real horror lies in the heady underpinnings of the screenplay. More than any of the sequels, Saw asks haunting questions about the ethicality of torture and America’s predisposition to violence.
The horror isn’t in demonic possession or an unkillable slasher, but in other humans doing awful things to each other. The previous year’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wrong Turn were smash-hit successes that banked on a similar promise. Americans were scared of – all at once – the world, their next-door neighbor, and themselves.
But where those movies traded in goofy abstractions of other people – from broad stereotypes to gory makeup – Saw doesn’t offer any such comfort. Most of the film takes place from the perspective of two victims, locked in a room and forced to figure a way out of their own demise. Their captor, John Kramer, is another sane human being who’s convinced in his own righteousness. He communicates with victims and police using cheap remnants of then-dying technology, like CRT TVs and cassette tapes, which adds a layer of remove and obfuscation to his method. Kramer’s self-proclaimed goal is transformative violence – the idea that people can become better human beings if they undergo a near-death experience.
Of course, this rarely goes as planned. Most of his victims die in his gristly, barely escapable contraptions. His biggest “success”, a struggling addict named Amanda Young, survives Kramer’s torture and is further groomed by him into becoming a killer herself. Amanda develops a self-destruction fixation on Kramer, deifying him and his methods. This, of course, is all part of his design – putting himself on a pedestal to control a vulnerable woman.
For the first three movies, John and Amanda capture, torture, and kill numerous people – ultimately amassing around ten victims between the two of them. In Saw, we’re left to believe Amanda is only an escaped victim; in II, she misleads a house of kidnapped strangers as they slowly kill themselves; and in III, Amanda kidnaps a doctor to attempt back alley brain surgery on a dying John.
These three films hinge on the dynamic between these two characters and what they represent. John embodies a staunch pro-torture mindset; he believes, sincerely, that he can make people appreciate their life better by hurting them. Amanda is already on a self-destructive spiral when John finds her, and instead of helping her, he uses this to his advantage. In these three movies – sequels notwithstanding – she is his confidante and his collaborator.
By Saw III, this has taken its toll. As Kramer lays dying from a brain tumor, Amanda begins to arrange unwinnable games – fatal scenarios with no possible escape for her victim. This is in direct violation of Kramer’s personal credo, but not an unreasonable conclusion for Amanda to reach. Most of the time, Kramer’s games end in death; Amanda has become desensitized to and disillusioned with the process specifically because of this. She begins to equate the death itself as punishment – a sort-of euthanasia.
This naturally ends in tragedy. Amanda loses faith in Kramer’s philosophy through the course of the movie. As John monologues to the doctor, it begins to dawn on Amanda that she’s always just been a pawn in somebody else’s games. That John’s self-aggrandizing Jigsaw persona is a cult of personality she’s been conned into joining. By the film’s climax, she reveals her rigged games to John and John, in kind, reveals that keeping the doctor alive is her test. Fed up, Amanda shoots the doctor in desperation. At that very moment Jeff, the doctor’s husband – fresh off a round of being tortured and torturing others himself – bursts into the makeshift operating room.
Upon finding his wife dead, Jeff shoots Amanda in retaliation, after which he’s presented with one final test from Kramer: finish him off for good, or forgive him to demonstrate his mercy. Enraged, the husband slices John’s windpipe with a surgical saw. What Jeff doesn’t know is that his young daughter was also kidnapped by John and Amanda – and that without either of them alive, she may very well starve to death in isolation.
A new game begins, but it’s one only mentioned in the following films. Jeff's daughter is a minor plot point that gets addressed in the director’s cut of Saw V – yes, really – but by that point, it felt like retroactive narrative epoxy.
Saw is best appreciated as a trilogy with six spin-offs. The original arc of John Kramer and Amanda Smith is contained within Saw, Saw II, and Saw III. Saw IV through The Final Chapter add additional context and continuity, but do little in the way of expanding the thematic intent of those first three movies. They’re all mostly compelling films – with the exception of Final Chapter, which is best skipped – but matter very little in regards to the original creators’ intent for the series.
There’s a reason for that, too. From IV onward, Saw had more than settled into its gorehound reputation as the original creators began to move away from the series. In fact, creators James Wan, Leigh Whannell, and Darren Lynn Bousman didn’t want to even come back for a third entry. However, the death of series producer and personal friend Greg Hoffman brought the trio together again for once last entry.
Said Bousman in 2006:
Greg passed away last year in December, and Leigh, James Wan and I all got together and had lunch the day we heard. We were sitting there and we were like, "You know what? They're going to do 'Saw III' with or without us, so let's do it for Greg." It was always his intention to have three films.
Taken as a trilogy, then, Saw is a cry for help from a country at war with its own conscience. From its opening moments with a shackled Cary Elwes, to the final shot – which sees both of its central antagonists lying dead – the three-film arc presents a dirty, glamourless portrayal of torture. The act is seen as barbaric – its central perpetrators an egocentric groomer and his traumatized victims. Dirty public restrooms and derelict warehouses – oft overlooked symptoms of decay – provide the perfect backdrop for the grotesque spectacle. A spectacle that is, at its very core, American.
Saw indicts the act of torture as futile and self-perpetuating. Through the acts of its antagonists and their victims, one thing after another goes wrong. John continues to murder without proving his dubious point. Amanda continues to suffer and self-harm under the thumb of an abuser. Each person they kidnap endures unimaginable hell without redemption nor salvation awaiting them. Only after each pound of flesh is paid does it become clear just how useless this all is. And at the end of it – cold, uninviting death. Something that John couldn’t prevent and that Amanda couldn’t save herself from because they chose violence.
To put it into cultural context, the first three Saw movies posited that torture can’t solve America’s problems. That finding an ‘other’ to cast blame on and torment – or force to torment each other – is a process that has no good ends. In the mid-aughts, this was timely messaging in the wake of Abu-Ghraib. As Americans struggled to make sense of the violence our own troops – the ‘good guys’ – perpetuated, Saw provided a cathartic polemic. It was a moral compass, made to remind viewers of their own humanity.
Wan and Whannell argued that if we become so detached from our empathy that we torture others, no reason or rationalization for that torture can justify it.
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