The Halloween Without A Saw

The year was 2004.  I was a freshman in college.  There I was, cruising around the internet, looking for interesting movie trailers and/or porn, when I stumbled upon something that looked like a combination of both, more akin to a snuff film than a major studio release.

The trailer for the original SAW featured perhaps the most iconic image from the movie, an image that would actually open the entire film and set a highwater mark for the franchise that many would argue hasn’t been matched since.  Perhaps it was in the simplicity.  A woman sitting in an empty room with a device on her head that resembled a reverse bear trap.  If she didn’t dig the key out of the flesh of the groaning man lying next to her, the trap would snap apart, taking her jaws with it.  The red band trailer summed things up thusly with the words “How f***ed up is that?”

Very.  But it was just the tip of the iceberg of what the Saw franchise would unleash upon the planet.

Torture porn hadn’t yet entered my vocabulary, nor the vocabulary of the world at large, and if it had, society would be in trouble.  Nowadays, the genre has become so commonplace and filled with pretenders and offshoots that we tend to shrug when a new movie opens that follows the same conventions as Saw.  Only HOSTEL could be considered a solid hit, but it’s sequel’s non-success cut away any chance at a long-running franchise.  Basically, we’ve seen enough of the genre.

Which brings us to something that I don’t think many realize:  this will be the first Halloween in 8 years in which a Saw movie will not be opening.  Eight years since we haven’t spent October witnessing diabolical, Rube Goldberg-esque traps crafted by John “Jigsaw” Kramer.  Eight years since we haven’t watched some poor sap engaged in a morality play which he or she inevitably fails.  Eight years since people tortured themselves for a shot at escape, with the rules becoming more and more complex with each go-around.

Grosses peaked with the second and third installments of the franchise, but Lionsgate continued to pocket money with each new movie.  Even SAW VI, the lowest grossing of the films, was able to turn a profit, mainly thanks to the low budgets associated with each entry.

SAW 3D, the last installment, rebounded slightly, possibly due to the allure of mangled limbs flying at the screen in full, bloody 3D, but the horror pic still couldn’t soar to the heights of the previous films.  Hollywood bean counters looked at the receipts and decided “no more.”

So what does this mean?  Do we live in a post-Saw world?  Nowadays, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY seems to be the go-to Halloween horror franchise.  About as low a budget as a movie comes, the Paranormal Activity series is the complete opposite of Saw.  Whereas Saw revels in the creative ways in which a person can be tortured and blood can be spilt on screen, Paranormal Activity is all restraint.  Saw bombarded the audience with images of bones breaking, blood bursting, skin roasting, and in one particularly gruesome case, an entire body being melted by acid from the inside out.  With Paranormal Activity, you’re lucky to catch a fleeting glimpse of a malicious shadow.  It’s what you don’t see that’s the scariest.  The audience now has to use their imagination to fill in what they’re not seeing, which a lot of the time is far more terrifying than what could ever be conjured on screen.

This Halloween, I’ve no doubt I will be going to see Paranormal Activity 3, probably even opening night.  But I’m disappointed that I won’t be able to see a new Saw movie.  There are many flaws in the films that are easy to point out.  They take themselves very seriously, almost to their own detriment.  The plots, which jump back and forth in time seemingly at random, have become so complex that one needs a roster just to keep track of the characters.  And in efforts to include Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw, who died in part 3, the character became so far-seeing into the future that his various back-up plans and ultimatums rivaled those of The Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT.  (Great movie, but for a man without a plan, Joker had a lot of things plotted out).

Yet with all this, there’s still a certain appeal to the movies that can’t be denied.  Tobin Bell, for one, is fantastic in every scene he’s in, even if these scenes became fewer and fewer as the films went on.  The filmmakers seemed to dig themselves into a hole by making their villain a cancer patient on the verge of death.  Yet one must give them credit.  They never copped out.  He never received a miraculous cure or rose from the dead like so many other killers supposedly based in reality (I’m looking at you Michael Myers).  Jigsaw died, and they let him die.  It was through the use of flashback that we were able to enjoy Bell’s pitch perfect performance through all seven films.  Bell took a part that in the first movie basically consisted of lying on the concrete and standing up for one scene, and he owned that role so completely in subsequent films that he made you forget how inconsequential the role truly is in that first movie.

Jigsaw was also never as one-dimensional as villains in other horror movies.  Jason killed people because he thought they were slutty.  Freddy Krueger killed people because their parents were assholes, or he found it humorous, or something.  Jigsaw never actually killed people.  He gave them the choice.  He took people who did horrible things in their life and gave them a chance to atone for their sins through corporal punishment.  In later installments, it’s Jigsaw’s protege Hoffman that devises the traps, but Jigsaw’s fingerprints can still be seen all over the gritty world.  Even from beyond the grave, Jigsaw tests friend and foe alike, constantly forcing his proteges to look at their own sins and challenging them not to fall too far into the darkness.  It’s a hyper-moral world that has rarely been visited in horror films, a world that’s embodied by the complexities of this quasi-villain.  We the audience know that if the main character simply does what the villain says instead of blatantly flipping a middle finger to the established rules of the universe, then all will be well.  Yet characters rarely follow the rules, and suffer a comeuppance accordingly.

Each film has its quirks, its positives and its negatives.  The first Saw was notable for that killer twist at the end, and for having Mr. Princess Bride himself, Cary Elwes, saw off his own leg after being chained in a dingy bathroom for a seeming eternity.  It also introduced the various constants we would come to expect from the series.  That creepy assed doll that rides a tricycle for no apparent reason.  The pig masks that must smell horrible when one puts it on.  And a decaying industrial setting that seemed to signify both urban squalor and the squalor in the hearts of the characters who infest a corrupt, immoral society.

The second movie expanded the scope, pulling together a handful of characters, each with their own frailties to overcome.  Donnie Wahlberg is on the case as Matthews, the detective trying to find his son, whom Jigsaw has kidnapped.  This installment did a wonderful job of painting in the unique set of morals that Jigsaw lives by.  Matthews ignores Jigsaw’s repeated requests to simply wait, because he thinks his son’s life is on the line.  At the end of the film, however, it’s revealed that the son has been safe all along, and the detective has thrown his life away in a futile search.  This showed that Jigsaw would not hurt an innocent child, and created a parameter for the series that would be followed until the end.  Jigsaw establishes the rules, protagonist ignores those rules, protagonist loses.  A man or woman’s own hubris ultimately proves to be their undoing.  That’s classic Greek tragedy.

The third movie was notable because a guy actually murders Jigsaw.  Thus far, Jigsaw had been the one constant, our tour guide through the torture and the madness.  That constant is snatched away from us in one blood-splattered power saw slash.  Again, the main character has been told that he can only save his wife if he stays his hand, but the man lets his own lust for vengeance get in the way, forgiving Jigsaw while simultaneously cutting his throat open.  His wife dies, the victim of an ingenious shotgun shell deploying device strapped to her neck, and the man himself is doomed.  There’s a daughter in the equation, which he’s told he’ll never find, and I honestly don’t remember if she’s ever brought up again in later movies.

The fourth film was transitional.  Filmmakers had to do backflips to figure out a way to keep Tobin Bell in the movie.  They got around this seeming inconvenience by having him leave a series of recorded messages behind that leads detectives to another game of torturous mayhem.  The big twist here is that the lead detective, Hoffman, is actually Jigsaw’s protege, and we close the movie with him picking up where John Kramer left off.  The morality play also continues, with the lead character being told he can save Detective Matthews simply by waiting outside the doors of Matthews’s cell until a timer counts down to zero, but the protagonist can’t do this.  Both men are killed, once again, because they can’t follow a moral directive.

The fifth film finds a new detective, Strahm, on the trail of the man who inherited Jigsaw’s mantle.  Strahm is actually able to escape Hoffman’s trap and continues his pursuit while a new morality game has been set in which five people pass a series of grueling traps designed to eliminate one person each time.  In a unique twist, the participants are told that they could have worked together in such a way that no one had to die, and then the ending trap, which seems impossible and involves giving prodigious amounts of blood, would not be fatal to the two survivors.  Strahm tracks down Hoffman and is asked to simply trust Jigsaw’s directives and enter a box.  He ignores this, Hoffman himself is pushed into the box and carried to safety, while Strahm is left to be crushed to death.

Part six is unique in that it’s quite possibly the best horror movie that’s been made about the recent health care debate.  The main character in this outing is Easton, an insurance executive whose job is to find loopholes in insurance contracts so that that company doesn’t have to pay the sick or injured.  This practice ended up costing Kramer valuable treatment that may have slowed down the cancer.  One could say it was an astute commentary on modern America’s broken medical system that unfairly punishes those that can’t afford proper healthcare, or one could sit back and watch the ghoulish death scenes.  Either way, sterling entertainment.

The final movie ties everything together.  Hoffman, increasingly unhinged, sets up one final game, this time for an author named Dagen, who claims to have survived one of Jigsaw’s traps and wrote a best-seller explaining how he did it.  Dagen turns out to be a fraud and must atone for his sins.  In a marked departure for the series, and possibly as a commentary on Hoffman’s increasing madness, Dagen does everything right yet still can’t save himself or his innocent wife.  Cary Elwes makes a welcome return to wreak vengeance on Hoffman, and it’s revealed that he has been helping John Kramer ever since the first movie.  The final film is also notable in that, for the first time, we get to witness a trap take place in broad daylight in front of a crowd, a nice twist that might take things in a new direction if the franchise ever again sees the light of day.

Saw is not for everybody.  It’s violent, needlessly complex, and often very poorly lit.  Yet something about it kept people filling in seats again and again and again.  Whether it’s the morality at its core or the ever more inventive ways to kill a person, people dug Saw.  It spawned action figures, videogames, an entire genre of movies, and even its own haunted house at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights in Hollywood (and, in a cruel twist worthy of the franchise, this year it was replaced by Hostel, its biggest competitor).

The film has many detractors, but one cannot detract from the impact which the film series had.  Every Halloween, whether you liked it or not, there would be a new Saw movie.  Some might roll their eyes and scoff at Hollywood’s money-grubbing love for sequels, and others lined up on opening day.

And yet, this Halloween there will be no more.  Horror fans will have to sate our appetites on THE THING and PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3.  It’s going to feel different.  I already miss the previews on television of people screaming, of crazy-assed traps, of Tobin Bell saying “I want to play a game.”  I was in high school the last time I lived in an October that didn’t have a Saw release.  And now that tradition is gone.

But there’s always time for new traditions, aren’t there?  I have no doubt some enterprising young executive will look at the numbers and decide that for x budget, a Saw movie can make x amount of dollars.  The traps will be reimagined with various tweaks, the setting will be moved to a Beverly Hills high school, and Robert Pattinson will be a sexy Jigsaw.

So rest easy horror fans.  Saw might be dead for now, but its reach extends far into the future, just as Jigsaw’s did.  Until then, we’ll just have to get our twisted morality play fix elsewhere.  Like televised court trials.