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bornforastorm · 1 year ago

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ok hannah, explain the saw thing to me (curious, not combative)

hooboy ben, good luck to me!!

first off, I think the appeal of Saw (and it's nine sequels lol) is partially and simply the appeal of all horror: it allows us to watch horrible things and think about horrible things from a safe, distanced place. It allows us to feel repulsion and horror and terror without any real risk. It's fiction, so however nasty it is, it's fake so it's fine, but the outlet for yuck and yikes still remains and can be cathartic. I think this is especially true in long running horror franchises, where after the first couple you know what you're getting into and can just enjoy the ride.

Now, for Saw in particular, yes there's the catharsis of the Scare and the Ick, the shiver and the shudder and then the laugh to release tension. Now, I understand not being into the Ick. I am not particularly into the Ick. I initially stopped watching the franchise after 3 because it was too icky for me! Eventually I went back and watched them all, but it took a long time and even now as someone less sensitive to Ick, I still look away from some parts. When I rewatch them, I tend to scrub through the ickiest parts (which makes each of these 90 minute movies only about 50 minutes long, natch).

So if not the traps and the Ick (which is the main appeal for some and certainly what my mother thinks the appeal is and is why she is therefore worried for me), what is the appeal? What makes Saw so compelling? What about these movies has driven me to madness? I can't speak for everyone, but for me--

(this may get long and it may not make any sense at all)

partially it's that I saw the first one when I was 14 and it changed me, and I'll always love it for that, and by extension I love what it spawned. It gave me the gift of horror movies! I had no idea a movie could do what Saw (2004) does, and suddenly the word of horror opened up for me. If a horror movie could be that, what else could horror be? That first movie made me insane. I watched it non-stop for months. It's a good little thriller starring Cary Elwes and a cute boy I had never seen before but was captivated by, and I was obsessed by this cheap little picture that's mostly playing in the sandbox of interpersonal dynamics against a backdrop of the Worst Day Of Your Life. "What would I do in this situation" is part of the fun mental game the audience plays when watching a Saw movie, and that first one engages with that question in such a small scale, almost sweet way and I love it. What would you do if you woke up in a crusty bathroom, chained to the wall, and your only instruction was to kill the other guy in the room with you? Well, you'd talk to him for eight hours and in the end you would hold his face and tell him everything was going to be okay. Love!!

After Saw 1, the movies get campier and goofier and, yes, ickier. 2 and 3 are pretty good! Icky! Then 4-7 are pure melodrama and camp and I looove the melodrama and camp. I recently bemoaned to dear friend Emily boasamishipper that it's a shame it's essentially impossible to watch these movies and experience the silly melodrama if you can't handle gore. So many good melodrama/plot scenes take place in locations where, like, there's a rotting corpse in the background. If you skip the gore completely, you will miss key information. It's unavoidable. And the traps are nasty. They're gross. I get it. It's undeniable.

BUT if you can handle gore enough to at least to close your eyes while it's happening, then tune back in, what you get is a really bonkers series with an insanely complicated timeline and even more complicated lore, populated by characters who are both complicated and complex and sometimes embarrassingly simple. Which is fun as hell. To me.

Mr Jigsaw himself is a very old man. He has 14 motivations that are constantly changing depending on what the movie feels would be most useful. Literally his motivations for doing torture crimes are: he has cancer, no wait and he's divorced, no wait and he and his wife lost a baby (the creepy doll was FOR the baby), no wait and he got denied health insurance coverage, no wait and he resents liars, no wait and-- and it just keeps going. He DIES in Saw 3, but they keep doing flashbacks so he can keep being in the movies, which complicates his history So much. These movies are dropping new Jigsaw lore constantly. This man claims to have never committed a murder, and in fact says he hates murderers, when he is personally responsible for dozens and dozens of gnarly deaths. Hypocrite king of all time. He's a civil engineer so he obviously knows how to design and build torture machines. Of course.

His main apprentice is a feral nightmare woman who also dies in 3 and largely appears in flashbacks after that. She's insane. We all love her. Mr Jigsaw keeps putting her in traps. She hates the other apprentices because she is daddy's favorite. It's the interpersonal dynamics, babyyy.

In 4, we're given another guy (Mark Hoffman! lame man of all time!) and are told he has always been in on the crimes, he was there the whole time we promise, and, oh right, he's a cop AND while on paper his backstory and motivation is pretty interesting, in practice he's weirdly boring AND he's honestly pretty bad at being the Jigsaw killer and other cops keep telling him that to his face. By movie 7 he's totally given up on the Jigsaw Killer thing and is just stabbing people. It's very funny. (and he's my favorite guy and I love him and he's in a total of 6 of these movies even though 99% of audience members can't stand him) (also when I say what in these movies drove me to madness? the true answer is this man's burly chest and bad acting)

Cops come and go and the movies can't decide how much cop drama they want to engage in. Luke Danes from Gilmore Girls is in 2 of these as the bitchiest cop I've ever seen. He weeps, he screams, he threatens witnesses, he's angry and suspicious and annoyed the entire time. He is part of two of the series' best traps. If the series brought him back tomorrow, I would cheer. Would it make sense? I don't care.

Characters who appeared in one scene two movies ago are now the main character because the other main characters keep getting Saw trapped. Sometimes characters essentially come back from the dead because they ran out of characters and needed someone to fill a certain kind of role in the story.

We never check in with Cary Elwes again, not even obliquely, until movie 7, and then we don't learn almost anything about what he's been up to.

Some people get put in traps for smoking or being depressed or engaging in light insurance fraud. Some people get put in traps for being rapists or murderers or Neo Nazis. Their crimes are in no way related to the severity of their traps. Does a private health insurance ceo who denies coverage sometimes (his job!) deserve to be melted in half by acid? Saw trap! Does a judge who shortened a manslaughter sentence deserve to drown in pig guts? Feels extreme! Saw trap! also there's a pig motif and nobody knows why! What's up with the pigs!!?? we may never truly know and that's part of the fun.

Movies 3 and 4 take place concurrently and that's a twist!! Movies 4-7 are so full of flashbacks it's sometimes hard to keep track of where in time you're supposed to be, and the question of "when did this series altering event actually occur?" can be hard to decipher. Movies fold in on each other at an alarming rate. Trying to explain the timeline of the Saw franchise is so bugnuts insane that my rl friend and podcast co-host made a game for me that was "Which Saw Event Happens First?" and honestly, it was hard!

So!!! I really love the goofy characters and the goofy plot machinations and the goofy lore-- and the movies take all these things so seriously, as they should. Any wink would ruin the magic, and how seriously 8 movies treat Mr Jigsaw and his very fucked up concept of morality and fairness is vital and delightful (I say 8 to mean 1-7+10, bc movies 8 and 9 are a little coy and smug about the whole thing in ways that rubbed me the wrong way. But then 10 is so We're Back Baby)

Then there's the general vibe and look of these things. The first one was made on one location with a budget of 1 million dollars. It's cheap as shit. It's so cheap they couldn't afford gore. Because the first one set the visual style for the series, they're all cheap as shit and they look it. They all look like shit. That's very comforting to me as a lover of the first one. It feels a little like being 14 again. The blue/green color timing, the frenetic editing, the grimy nasty sets (literally when a Saw movie has a true outdoor scene, it feels wrong), the at best c-list actors giving truly c-list performances, the goofy reveals set to a remix of the same song over and over again-- it all feels familiar and cozy, like cuddling up in bed during a thunderstorm.

It's a little bit nostalgia and a little bit the movie viewer I've become with age. I like to have fun. I like to be scared, but not too much. I like silliness. Saw is silly to me. I love it dearly. I love it's cast of nobody, not great, not that hot actors. These aren't hot teens getting murdered! I love it's heightened world where the cops never clean up a crime scene so if you want to revisit a trap from three movies ago, you can. It's outlandish and absurd and great.

I get why it isn't for everyone. It either clicks for you or it doesn't, you can either handle the gore or you can't, you either vibe with the silliness or you don't. Most people I know who like them, like them for that silly, camp quality and the ever increasing intricacy of the world, which one simply has to grin and bear and go, "yeah sure, this might as well be true." None of them are objectively five star films. Not even close. Their badness is beloved to me, their silliness, even their gross out traps and goops of gore. I've become someone who likes all that.

So in conclusion: It's silly!!!! it's so dang silly. If you can giggle and laugh at an icky movie, the Saw movies will make you giggle and laugh. There's much to laugh at. They're a roller-coaster ride of silly plot and gooey gore and weird characters and confusing, beautiful lore. It's the rules!!

The Saw Thing, for me, is that they're good, silly fun soaked in globs of corn syrup blood 🙏 they're all 93 minutes long 🙏 they're really fun to goof on with your friends 🙏 they gave me a crush for 14 year old me (leigh whannell, cutie) and a crush for 33 year old me (costas mandylor, burly brickhouse) 🙏 they gave me horror movies 🙏 they're the gift that keeps on giving and I can't explain it any more than that

#saw #does any of this make any sense??? i dunno #these movies are insane and they drove me insane #and I love it!!!#about me

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