20 years of impossible choices in “Saw”

Two men awaken in an abandoned industrial bathroom, each chained to a pipe. Having found hacksaws in the toilet tank, they unsuccessfully try to escape from their thick chains.

That’s when the doctor, played by Cary Elwes, realizes their kidnapper, and it makes Saw’s impossible choice visceral: “He doesn’t want us to break our chains. He wants us to cut our own feet.”

Saw, released 20 years ago this week, was never supposed to be a success. It was conceived as a low-budget calling card for two Australian film students who wanted to launch their careers with a messy sensation and a neat idea: a serial killer who forces his victims to prove they want to stay alive through bloody sacrificial missions.

Instead, it earned more than 80 times its budget at the box office, created the horror villain of the new millennium, and inspired the “torture porn” label, with the revulsion increasing with each subsequent franchise entry.

Two decades later, it may be hard to remember that the original Saw was less about gore and more about morality.

“What would you do to save your life or someone else’s?” said actor Shawnee Smith, summing up the underlying tension behind the franchise’s elaborate traps. In order to escape the reverse bear trap that traps her head in Saw, Smith’s character is forced to find the key in another man’s stomach. He’s sleepy, but still alive.

In Saw, Cary Elwes’ character expresses the tension and appeal of the franchise: “He doesn’t want us to break our chains. He wants us to cut our own feet.”

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Elvis, best known for his role as Westley in The Princess Bride, said he liked Saw because it was a horror story filled with ethical and moral questions.

“It’s a thinking man’s thriller,” he said.

The germ of the idea that became Saw was simple: two men locked in a room with a body between them. James Wan and Leigh Whannell, fellow film school students at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, were looking for an opportunity to develop their first feature film and discussed ideas until one stuck. They wrote the script together, and Wang became the director.

Wang, who went on to star in big-budget Hollywood films as well as screwball horror flicks like “Insidious” and “Malignant,” said “Saw” turned classic stereotypes on their heads.

“Oh, did you see that? Oh, you think you know what’s going to happen? Wang said from a dark basement bathroom in London, a fitting tribute to “Saw” and the only place he had cell service while filming the next installment in the “Conjuring” franchise. “I’m going to try something else you haven’t seen before.”

Classic Saw tropes—serial killers, haunted detectives, creepy puppets—are mashed together and twisted around the undeniable binary of its central choices.

Unlike the winking meta-horror that came before it, including the teen horror-loving Scream and the Rube Goldberg shenanigans of Final Destination, no amount of genre knowledge can save Saw’s characters from having to make a final decision.

Film critic David Edelstein, writing in New York magazine in 2006, described Saw and some of its peers, most notably Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), as “torture porn.” But the first Saw isn’t particularly gruesome compared to the deaths that plagued this year’s Frightener 3 and Into the Wild.

To escape the reverse bear trap that surrounds her head, Shawnee Smith’s character is forced to find the key in another man’s stomach.

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Saw is more of a detective thriller with a horror twist. The main instrument acts like a rusty Chekhov’s gun, and the characters’ desperation is terrifying.

The franchise’s pitfalls are created by the character John Kramer (Tobin Bell), a terminally ill cancer patient who is angry at people for wasting their lives. Kramer, who would eventually become known as Jigsaw, is technically not a serial killer. Each victim is given the choice to live.

“Deep down John, although he’s certainly a little ruthless in his approach, is about saving souls,” Bell said.

The concept arose from Whannell’s personal experience with recurring migraines in his early twenties. Sitting in the waiting room before his CT scan, he wondered how being diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor could change someone.

“It feels like it’s game time,” Whannell, who also plays the second man stuck in the bathtub, said of the killer’s motives. “He gives them this deadline and makes them do extreme things like, ‘How bad do you want to live?'”

“Saw” did not have an easy path to creation. When it came time to make the film, Australian funding dried up.

Wan and Whannell were willing to scrape together the money to make the film on the cheap, but Whannell’s manager, Stacy Testro, thought it might work in Hollywood, where she also had an office. Instead of sending it to producers in the US with a script, the writers shot a 10-minute short film that showed the reverse bear trap scene with Whannell on the rig.

Testro remembers watching the short film in her living room, with her luggage at the door and her car waiting for her at the airport. “It was just exciting,” she said.

Producers Evolution Entertainment—Gregg Hoffman, Oren Kules and Mark Burg—were so impressed that they gave Wan and Whannell a $700,000 shooting budget for a chaotic 18-day shoot, cutting costs by filming mostly in the bathroom. Wang, who previously worked in stop-motion animation, also hand-made Billy the puppet, a disturbing ventriloquist doll with red spiral cheeks, a tricycle and the franchise’s most famous line: “I want to play a game.”

Wang used papier-mâché, table tennis balls for Billy’s eyes, and cardboard boxes to fill the child’s tuxedo for the body. (At first he also had a bowler hat, Wang said, but that looked too stupid.)

The limited budget did not prevent the film’s ideas from resonating with audiences.

“The first movie was all about ethics and how far you can go and what’s right and what’s wrong with humanity,” Burg said, recalling that Evolution thought Saw would be a version of Se7en. David Fincher (1995).

“Saw” was influenced by “Se7en,” in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt play detectives pursuing a serial killer who punishes his victims through elaborate setups.

New Line Cinema

Whannell described his goal for “Saw” as a mixture of “Se7en” and “Cube”. In Fincher’s film, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are detectives pursuing a serial killer who models his murders after the Seven Deadly Sins, punishing his victims with elaborate performances that symbolize their moral failings. In the unusual Canadian sci-fi horror film The Cube (1997), inmates of a mysterious prison travel through rooms equipped with traps.

The expanded Saw franchise—an 11th film is due out next year—hasn’t always lived up to the ideas set forth by the first film. Wan never directed another Saw film, while Whannell co-directed Saw II and wrote the script for Saw III.

In the decades since the release of Saw, Wan has directed such popular franchises as Aquaman (2018) and Furious 7 (2015). Whannell’s other directing credits include The Invisible Man (2020), starring Elisabeth Moss, and the upcoming The Wolf Man, both modern takes on horror classics.

All of this success stems from two friends who were first-time filmmakers who tried to find a story that seemed compelling and then made ethical choices with bloody results.

Whannell is most proud of the Saw franchise’s enormous impact on popular culture. His favorite: In “The Sopranos,” a character becomes fixated on promoting a movie he describes as “Saw” meets “The Godfather Part II.” Billy the puppet was recently added to the popular battle royale video game Fortnite.

“Whether we like it or not,” Whannell said, “we have essentially created a millennial Freddy Krueger.”