NOTE: The following piece contains spoilers of the films Saw and Hostel.
By 2004, the optimism which was a feature of the run-up to the new millennium had entirely dissipated. The dotcom bubble had burst, and the long 1990s economic boom was coming to an end. The world was shocked by the awful events of September 11th. We were living in uncertain times, anxious about the prospect of further terrorist attacks. President Bush had led the US into war in Iraq, and in 2004 the appalling abuses at Abu Ghraib were brought to the public’s attention; horrifying images of torture and sadistic abuse of detainees filled newspapers and televisions.
Perhaps it is no surprise that horror films took something of a cultural turn at the time. Post-Scream, the genre had been dominated by more light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek offerings, but as terrorism and war filled television screens, horror began to shift more towards gritty realism; films which took themselves more seriously, in keeping with more sombre times. And one of the key films which represented this shift was Saw. A film put together on a budget of only $1.2 million, which became one of the highest grossing horror franchises of all time, and completely revolutionised the genre.
Saw opens with two men chained to pipes at opposite ends of a bathroom. They can only win their freedom by successfully completing the “games” presented to them by their captor, known as the Jigsaw Killer. Although we don’t learn all about Jigsaw’s back story and motivations until later instalments of the franchise, his character is not your typical horror movie villain, hellbent on violent rampages. Instead, following his own personal tragedies, Jigsaw comes to feel that people have stopped valuing their lives, and places them in traps to try and jolt them out of their complacency, to stop taking their good fortune for granted. Unlike standard horror fare, Jigsaw believes he is helping his victims.
The feel of the film is far more grimy and realistic than many contemporaneous horror releases, which were polished, bright, comedic. Creators James Wan and Leigh Whannell made their limited budget work for them; sparse sets, low lighting, and deliberately chaotic editing in the most anxiety-inducing points of the film created a grungy, rustic, industrial aesthetic which, along with Charlie Clouser’s note-perfect soundtrack, sets the mood impeccably. As a 22 year old getting more and more into horror, I fell in love with the universe created by Wan and Whannell; the mythology set up in the first film and developed over future instalments makes the Saw franchise one of the most intricately planned out storylines of any horror series. It was thrilling, like nothing I’d ever seen, finishing with one of the great twist endings. Saw is by far and away my favourite film.
So I feel compelled to defend it against what seems to be very much the default opinion on Saw today: that it is gratuitously violent, that it is one of the main examples of the “torture porn” subgenre which emerged in the mid-2000s.
“Torture porn” was a term coined by American film critic David Edelstein in a 2006 essay. Edelstein noted how torture and mutilation were increasingly finding their way from the fringes into more mainstream films, listing movies such as Hostel, Wolf Creek, The Devil’s Rejects and The Passion Of The Christ alongside Saw. A working definition of “torture porn” is not offered in the article, though I think perhaps we know it when we see it; it seems reasonable to class a film as torture porn when the violence is gratuitous, when stripping out the gore and blood would leave you with very little movie left.
Hostel, released a year after Saw, is a classic example of the genre. The gore is explicit and little is left to the imagination. The whole story arc involving Kana is almost entirely unnecessary to the film, but it does give Eli Roth an opportunity to show us much more unpleasantness. Wolf Creek, as Edelstein says, is extraordinarily cruel. But it is notable that, for each film he lists as torture porn, Edelstein devotes a paragraph to explaining how horrific they are, with the exception of one: Saw. This is presumably because it is difficult to sustain the claim that Saw is nothing more than mindless carnage once you start looking at what the film actually is.
If anything, Saw is the antithesis of a torture porn film. During the most horrifying parts of the film, the blood and gore is very deliberately not shown. At the film’s denouement, when Lawrence Gordon saws off his foot, the camera pans away, focusing instead on the reactions of Gordon and his fellow captive. Nor do we get to see Zepp as Adam bludgeons him to death. We learn that other people have perished in Jigsaw’s traps, but we see very little of their suffering. The gore and the violence is much more implied and assumed than it is laid bare. Gruesome imagery is kept in the shadows. The terror is psychological.
The creators never set out to make a movie filled with gratuitous violence, and Saw just isn’t that. As James Wan says, it is a mystery thriller, a whodunnit which is far closer in spirit to Se7en than any of the torture porn movies. But where Se7en followed the police officers hunting down the serial killer, Saw instead turned the cameras on Jigsaw’s victims, placing them at the centre of the story, shifting the feel from thriller to horror.
Saw perhaps suffers from the fact that later sequels certainly did lean in to violence and butchery to a much greater degree, and also that it was released at the same time as the other films Edelstein lists; it was easy to bundle Saw up with the rest and present it as part of horror’s “torture porn” moment, but it bears no real relation to the rest of them.
It is worth noting that since Saw, James Wan and Leigh Whannell have worked on the Insidious franchise, with Wan also involved in The Conjuring; these are taut, psychological, chilling, largely bloodless movies from film-makers who understand that gore is not needed to make a great horror film.
Saw was never part of the torture porn genre. It needs to be understood on its own terms; as an intelligent, psychological horror film which refreshed a genre struggling for inspiration.
It is a beautiful piece of film-making, and one which deserves far better than to be written off as mindless violence.