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When we think of long-running horror franchises, traditionally we’re talking about strings of movies that don’t have much to do with each other beyond the ongoing premise. This stuff is supposed to be cheap, disposable thrills that never makes you think too hard about anything–or at least this is how movie studios have usually treated them. But that’s not the case with Saw–which, despite being known mostly as “torture porn,” sent us down an incredibly intricate seven-movie rabbit hole with its story during its original run. Saw isn’t just horrifying and gross–it’s smart, too. And now, at 20 years old, it deserves to be revisited.
Saw is the story of a serial murderer named John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, who puts people in lethal contraptions that will kill them if they don’t complete some horrendous task that usually requires egregious self-harm. The opening of Saw II, for example, featured a guy whose head would be destroyed with a spike-filled iron mask if he didn’t unlock his harness with a key that was hidden in the back of his own eye socket–to survive, he’d have to gouge his own eye out. And those are just the simple ones. There are plenty of even more messed up multi-person games as well.
But there’s an argument to be made–and, indeed, I’m about to make it–that Saw is the greatest horror franchise ever because it’s satisfying both viscerally and intellectually. It’s not perfect, of course–Jigsaw and Spiral were disappointing spin-off attempts, and there’s always some messiness when you’re making up the story as you go along, which is how the Saw series was assembled. But it’s really a matter of effort–the folks making these movies cared enough to try, and it works so much better than it should as a result.
To me, though, Saw isn’t just an outlier within the horror genre–there’s more of a commitment to the overall plot than I’ve ever seen from any original movie franchise. Star Wars and Marvel are great and all, but those franchises can’t keep much straight from one movie to the next. And, somehow, the movie series that taught me it didn’t have to be that way is Saw. Let’s take a deeper look into why that is.
