As of last month, it’s been 20 years since the release of James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw, the start of the now-beloved horror film franchise that brought us John Kramer, aka Jigsaw, one of the most recent and popular icons in the genre.
Once deemed as “torture porn” by even the purest horror movie fans in the early aughts, the Saw franchise has gone on to produce 10 films (and a spin-off), and gross more than $1 billion at the box office; one of only five horror franchises to accomplish this financial feat.
The financial triumph started early with the first film’s initial success. Saw made more than 100 times its meager $1.2 million budget, grossing $103 million at the box office. This budget-to-box office ratio made it one of the most successful horror films of all time, right up there with The Blair Witch Project (which came before), and Paranormal Activity (which came after).
It also successfully launched James Wan’s filmmaking career; he was immediately given the green light for the Insidious and Conjuring franchises, and he now works on massive-budget blockbusters, like Furious 7 and DC’s Aquaman movies.
Keeping the budget low in Saw came from several different intelligent decisions.
The cast was minuscule, using mostly unknowns with a few recognizable faces (but hardly the most popular A-listers) thrown in, like Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, Predator 2), Cary Elwes (The Princess Bridge), and Dina Meyer (Starship Troopers).
With the exception of some flashback scenes and cat-and-mouse cop drama, the film was primarily shot and acted in one location, using Cary Elwes and Leigh Whannell (who also wrote the film)’s incredible chemistry. Special effects (including gore) were kept to a minimum, and cleverly edited scenes made the “torturous” scenes feel a lot worse than they actually were.
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The real “torture porn” aspects didn’t come into play until the franchise’s second and third films, when the teams actually had heftier budgets to play with ($4 and $10 million, respectively). The film’s success came from the idea of how savage Jigsaw’s games were, not necessarily the things we saw on screen.
In all honestly, the scenes were hardly more brutal and not unlike David Fincher’s Se7en, which was released almost a decade before and is hardly considered a horror movie.
Two things in particular helped the film along; the marketing and the word-of-mouth about the twist.
From the first release of the movie’s posters, we knew that someone was losing a limb, and most likely, in a brutal fashion. Severed hands and feet on the posters and in the trailers and seeing rusty hacksaws next to our two main characters (who are also chained to pipes) was a surefire way to get horror fans invested in what was to come.
When it comes to gore in horror, all fans ever needed was a little tease of something that could have potentially been next level, especially with the toned-down decade of the early ‘90s to the early 2000s when it came to the copious amounts of guts and gore we got throughout the ‘80s.
Obviously, the twist is what hooked fans into the franchise for years and films to come. I’m not sure there was a single person who assumed that the body that had been in the predominant scenes for the entire movie, belonged to a very much alive John Kramer, the mastermind behind the game.
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I remember seeing this in the theater after some other friends recommended it. I can still remember having to pick my jaw up off the floor not only after watching Danny Glover, the cop hero from the Lethal Weapon movies, fail in his mission, but also, the two main “protagonists” of the movie completely fail their tests, with the villain winning and walking away unscathed.
“I want to play a game…”
Without breaking the bank, Saw was able to give us a sympathetic antagonist, an iconic visual character in Billy the puppet, edge-of-your-seat twists and turns in the story, wincing, horrific horror moments, a horror quote that has entered the pop culture zeitgeist, and a fantastic and memorable musical score from Charlie Clouser that would become the theme of the franchise.
Aside from its sequels, Saw set the tone for an entire new generation of horror films that would be released throughout the 2000s-2010s, and even still today. Horror films were seemingly given the green light from Hollywood to take another step into the extreme.
Movies like The Collector and South Korea’s I Saw The Devil released, and would have never come out the decade before. Eli Roth quickly jumped onto the “torture porn” train with the Hostel films, which were also massive financial successes.
An entire subgenre of “tortuous game” films would come out in the oncoming years, all the way to today, including Would You Rather, Are You Scared?, Exam, Escape Room, and the recent Midnight Peepshow.
Saw was simply its own special kind of horror movie, and one that many people, including horror fans, shy away from. But over two decades, 11 films (with Saw XI on its way!), a billion dollars, you can’t argue that it has made a unique impact on the horror genre.
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