No horror franchise ends where it started. The first Nightmare on Elm Street was conceived as a genuinely upsetting horror film, a far cry from the cartoonish winking camp of Freddy vs Jason. The four-film deterioration from the meticulously crafted Oscar winning heights of The Silence of the Lambs to the assault on good taste that was Hannibal Rising marks a particularly steep decline. It’s hard to believe that the team behind the first Friday the 13th envisioned sending Jason to space, or that either Williams Friedkin or Peter Blatty would ever have approved of the barrel-bottom cynicism of The Exorcist: Believer. But at least two of those franchises get a bit of a pass due to the esteem their first entry is held in. You can’t blame a classic for its cash in sequels.
In 2021, Saw screenwriter Leigh Whannell gave a carefully worded interview to the official Saw podcast. In theory he was there as part of an ongoing promotion for the ninth installment in the series, Spiral, but Whannell tactfully separated his original from the films it would go on to spawn. To Whannell there are two Saws – the low budget, Se7en influenced original Sundance darling, and the increasingly gory labyrinthine soap opera of the sequels, from which he and original director James Wan quickly moved on.
But the first Saw doesn’t tend to get insulated from its sequels the way some other franchise starters do. And given that the first film was fairly lauded on release as a deviously clever and inventive potboiler, it’s worth asking why. Should Saw be considered apart from what came after? And is what came after really such a step down that it needs to be?
The answer to that is complicated. Twenty years on, the scrappy and ghoulish imagination of Saw is still electric. The hook is irresistible to most thriller fans – two men wake up chained on either side of a corpse in a bathroom with the instruction that one has to kill the other by the end of the day or his family will die. And the film absolutely delivers on its premise – the screws tighten and the twists keep coming up until the moment that would seal Saw’s fate as a franchise-starter – the corpse on the floor standing up and revealing himself as the true killer all along. This, along with pounding theme song “Hello Zepp” and the horrifying imagery of the ‘Reverse Bear Trap’ made the film instantly iconic, the kind of thing you just had to see. Saw made 100 times its budget at the box office. There was no world in which it didn’t get sequels.
But if you strip away those subsequent movies and imagine that Saw was a one off, you can start to see Whannell’s point. Because the first Saw isn’t really a horror movie at all.
The first film could almost work as a contained stage play. It’s more character driven than audiences probably remember, with Lawrence and Adam’s suspicions of each other giving way to outright loathing and, by the end, respect, loyalty and something almost like friendship. Neither are particularly good people. But neither deserve to be here. It makes for a story that is a far cry from the later films’ succession of various bottom feeders shovelled into various meat grinders; we might not like Adam or Lawrence, but we come to invest in them and a lot of that is down to the way Whannell’s script gradually reveals their layers.
The gore might also surprise some modern viewers, mostly because there isn’t very much of it. Even the infamous moment where Lawrence saws off his foot is far less graphic than its reputation would suggest – the worst you see is an initial cut and the rest is mostly left to the imagination. Elsewhere, the film borrows liberally from the Psycho shower scene strategy of fast cuts to make you think you’re seeing what you’re not actually seeing at all. There’s restraint to the violence and patience to the plotting yet the reveals, when they come, are exhilarating.
There are elements that probably hold it back from being a respected classic in its own right. Whannell’s debut script is fantastic, but as an actor he’s less impressive. He mostly manages to hold his own against the veteran Cary Elwes, but both descend into some pretty bad high-school-theatre histrionics by the end. Wan’s direction borders on MTV-style freneticism at times, and not always in an enjoyable way. Saw is the work of young and inexperienced filmmakers but it’s work that demonstrates why Wan and Whannell would both go on to have such successful careers.
Saw II mostly stayed true to what made the original work. It’s more violent, yes, but the most upsetting scene in the film has almost no blood, relying more on the all-too relatable fear of needles. The two twists it ends with don’t quite have the same shock value as its predecessor, but they’re more satisfying and make more sense.
But already the hints of what the films would turn into were in place. There are more characters and most are archetypes, in place to serve as canon fodder for Jigsaw’s new traps. Saw II retains points for a far more thorough introduction to Tobin Bell’s immediately compelling John Kramer, but the formula was creeping in.
With every subsequent Saw film, the characters became more disposable and the gore more extreme. Within minutes of Saw III, more blood was spilled than the original film ever indulged in. There’s none of that ‘what-you-don’t-see-is-scarier’ judiciousness when you’re watching someone’s bones splinter out of their twisting limbs.
The Saw franchise has often been dismissed as torture porn. Despite the fact that the first film wasn’t and many of the later ones have far more to recommend them than the uninitiated might assume, it’s hard to argue with that overall judgement as every subsequent chapter tries to top the previous ones for sheer bloodletting. By the time 3D entrails were flying at the audience in the seventh installment, Saw had gone the way of almost every horror franchise and descended into self-parody. It would take three attempted reboots to arrive at one that audiences actually liked – 2023’s interquel Saw X, which brought back Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith and a relatively thoughtful focus on character. In short, the things that made the first few films work to begin with.
But all of this risks implying that the later Saw films were more exercises in over-the-top gore than anything interesting in their own right, and this is where the legacy of the first film really paid off. The most fascinating thing about Saws III through VII, and the reason they retain such a strong following today, is the commitment they have to their own complex, convoluted and sprawling mythology. These are films that spend an inordinate amount of time throwing red meat to the forum dwellers – hints as to the whereabouts of certain missing characters, mysterious letters that take three films to be explained, flashbacks that give context to the actions of characters several films ago. It’s schlocky horror franchise as soap opera, and while the storytelling becomes a bit tangled and baroque at times, the chronological obfuscation, sleight of hand and layering of arcane clues could not be truer to the template established by Wan and Whannell in that first film.
2017’s Jigsaw and 2021’s Spiral both tried to move away from the now somewhat tortuous plotting. Neither commit to hitting the hard reboot button, but they try to tell new stories with new characters and concerns. Neither won over either fans or the theoretical new audiences they were chasing. Saw X, then, returned with gusto to the mythology and foibles of the original cycle. In Saw VI a desperate John Kramer seeks an experimental medical cure to his cancer but is denied by his insurance company. When told not to strike out on his own due to the expense, he retorts “I have money”. This minor detail always begged the question as to why Kramer never pursued this seemingly effective option. Saw X, fourteen years later, provided a two-hour long answer, a plugged gap in the continuity that only hardcore fans would care about. For its trouble, it was a box office smash and earned the franchise’s first positive Rotten Tomatoes rating.
It’s funny that Saw X is seen as a critical hit, given that nobody would argue that it’s better than the first two films, despite both faring far worse on Rotten Tomatoes. But it speaks to the fact that over the past two decades the Saw franchise, despite dismissals, has endured and a return to what people liked about the originals would always be welcomed with open arms. Yeah, Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith look twenty years older than they’re supposed to given it’s set between the first and second films, but who cares? It’s Saw, original recipe!
Leigh Whannell might beg to differ. But the secret of the Saw franchise and the reason the original has never quite been fully separated from the rest is that for all their excesses and shortcomings, the best of the later films thoroughly embraced the nasty cleverness, clockwork plotting, attention to detail, heightened lore and compelling characters that made the original stand out to begin with. Watching Saw today it’s clear that it was never supposed to be a franchise-starter. But the fact that it was speaks in the simplest terms to its power, impact and legacy.