The child of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants, James Wan grew up in Perth, Australia. He would attend the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, majoring in Arts in Media. As part of a 1998 student project, Wan co-directed a 72-minute long horror movie called “Stygian.” The film has never been commercially released. From what little has been written about it, you get the impression that the filmmakers are embarrassed by their novice effort. However, at least one positive thing came out of “Stygian.” One of the actors in the movie, playing the role of “Clown / Punk Kid,” was Leigh Whannell. The two hit it off and began writing a script for a feature, inspired by their own nightmares. Wan filmed one scene from the script as a ten minute short, entitled “Saw.” It managed to attract enough attention from investors to put together a million dollar budget for a feature length version. Lion Gates Films picked the movie up, originally intending it for a straight-to-video release before deciding to put it in theaters, on the Friday before Halloween of 2004. Wan and Whannell's “Saw” became a pop culture phenomenon. The movie would spawn multiple sequels, launch several spin-offs, and popularize an entire subgenre. “Saw” and all its imitators have prompted much debate and controversy along the way. 22 years after these humble roots, how does the original “Saw” hold up today?
A man named Adam awakens in a bathtub, a small light on a string emerging from his mouth. He realizes he's in a dingy public bathroom, his ankle chained to the wall. He's not alone. Dr. Lawrence Gordon, a surgeon he does not know, is similarly bound to the opposing wall. A corpse lies on the floor between them, a pistol in its hands. The duo discover two hand saws and a pair of audio cassette. They relay a message, that Gordon must kill Adam if he hopes to see his wife and daughter again. Similarly, Adam can only escape if he murders the other man. They both must saw through their feet for either objective to be fulfilled. Gordon quickly realize they are caught up in the latest “game” of the Jigsaw Killer: A deranged inventor who captures people – deemed guilty of some sin by him, as explained via the puppet he uses as an avatar – and forces them to escape deadly, elaborate contraptions or traps he's created. The police determine that Jigsaw always watches his victims. As Gordon and Adam struggle to escape the fatal scenario, the obsessed Detective Tapp is hot on the killer's trail.
You can't talk about "Saw" without discussing its impact on the horror genre. The film's surprise success popularized what became known by the deeply unfortunate moniker of "torture porn," gory horror films focused on elongated scenes of sadism and bodily mutilation. The fad generated a minor moral panic, marking the last time in my life I can recall horror movies actually being deemed "dangerous" by the press. You can debate the merits and negatives of this trend all you want. You can also argue about whether the first "Saw" truly qualifies as one of these movies. Most of its intense gore happens off-screen and there truly aren't any moments of physical torture. However, a more interesting question is why this hyper-grim style of horror was so popular for a brief time. "Saw" was made by two Australians, so it's hard to say how much of this was intentional. However, "Saw" captured the anxieties of post-9/11 America. The nebulous threat of "terrorism" could strike anywhere, at any time. In "Saw," the victims are always abducted from mundane locations like a parking garage or their own home. They are thrust into a sadistic scenario by a villain with motivations that they can't totally grasp, beyond knowing this is somehow their own fault. Much the same way the average American was told the terrorists – that could strike anywhere, at any time – hated us "for our freedom," despite the hard-to-repress creeping feeling that America's foreign policy gave birth to the monster that was vexing it. Meanwhile, the hyper grim visuals, of people awakening in dilapidated bathrooms or basement torture chambers, reflected the videos of journalists being beheaded distributed over the internet or briefly glimpsed on news programs.
Funnily enough, I'm doubtful Wan and Whannall were thinking about these ideas much at all when conceiving "Saw." Instead, they simply hoped to cook up the cheapest, easiest premise for a thriller that their meager budget could afford: Two guys in a room. In a lot of ways, "Saw" is a triumph of practicality and low budget creativity. Probably inspired by "Cube" – an often unspoken but obvious influence on "Saw" – the movie manages to generate some decent suspense and a compelling mystery from this extremely limited premise. The audience, at first, have exactly as much information about what's happening as Adam and Dr. Gordon. Jigsaw leaving clues and messages for his victims makes the film a game to be played and solved. (As well as the predecessor to the late 2010s popularity of "escape rooms.") The film doesn't wait long to cheat, going outside the four walls of its setting via flashbacks and other scene. A version focused solely on the guys chained up in the bathroom probably would've been tighter, smarter, shorter, more intense, and far less commercial.
The gorier, more brutal sequels and imitators that followed in "Saw's" wake were the work of horror nerds following the intensity of fucked-up Asian movies. Wan and Whannall's influences were much more humble. These guys wanted to be the next David Fincher, drawing from the gritty, grim mood and visuals of "Seven." Much like that film, "Saw" freely exaggerates the clichés of the cop vs. killer thriller popularized by "The Silence of the Lambs." If Hannibal Lecter was the most brilliant and twisted killer the early nineties could concoct, and John Doe was his more elaborate and meticulous disciple, then Jigsaw is the apotheosis of the serial killer as a genius with a convoluted modus operandi. He's clearly gifted as an inventor and engineer but he uses that ability to fashion complex contraptions of death and agony, all in service of making some sort of sick point. Meanwhile, this first film includes a detective element. Danny Glover plays Tapp, the cop so fixated on hunting down the killer that he's gone far beyond the moral and reasonable boundaries in his pursuit. You can tell Tapp is a little obsessed because he's got an apartment with walls pasted with newspaper clippings and clues. He's given a detailed backstory, seeking out Jigsaw to avenge a dead partner. It's all stuff we've seen many times before in past films, added to pad out a script that otherwise would have been composed entirely of two guys in a room.
This points towards something else that you inevitably notice about “Saw,” here in the future year of 2025: This movie is kind of goofy, isn't it? Not only because the visual style is trying so hard to be freaky and extreme that it immediately becomes antiquated, though that is a big factor why. Not simply because the movie assigns things like barb wire, ventriloquist dummies, and hooded executioners – clichés even at the time – an unearned degree of seriousness, though this too makes the film play more like camp than it did in 2004. Largely, the performances strike me as rather over-the-top. Leigh Whannall gets all the silliest dialogue, his delivery proving that he was probably better suited to being behind a keyboard than in-front of a camera. Cary Elwes grotesquely overacts as Dr. Lawrence, most prominently in the final act, as things get more desperate. Danny Glover also spends most of his screen time staring wide-eyed and sweaty-skinned, playing the character as obsessed and hammering that one note as hard as he can.
Once you notice the gulf between the seriousness “Saw” is clearly striving for and the evident camp in its execution, it becomes difficult not to notice a lot of the silly things about this grisly motion picture. Namely, the Jigsaw Killer's attempts to justify his grotesque actions. Supposedly inspired by a moment in Whannell's life when he feared having a brain tumor, the franchise's villain puts people through Hell – almost always killing them in the process – out of some twisted desire to punish those who have “wasted” their lives. Among his victims we see are a drug addict and a man who attempted suicide despite seemingly having no problems in his life. Which, ya know, does not show an especially nuanced understanding of depression or addiction. Since the Jigsaw Killer is a sadistic maniac, I don't think we're meant to take his justifications seriously. At the same time, the film obviously considers some of these ideas novel, if not “deep.” When it is so blatantly a threadbare justification for the elaborate traps the script cooks up. Jigsaw could have merely been a psycho and “Saw's” premise probably would have made more sense if he was. However, a desire to mark him as another great cinematic madman or to grapple with some sort of real world topics saddled the budding franchise with the goofiest of backgrounds.
Scenes like that suggest, despite the many ways in which “Saw” tries too hard or overestimates its own seriousness, there is some genuine cleverness on-display here as well. Wan and Armstrong do engineer some striking visuals once or twice. A shot of Glover and his partner stepping up through a staircase, as smoke billows around their ankles, is cool. The notorious Reverse Trap Mask is a genuinely nightmarish idea. Once you divorce the premise from any real world logic, it is indeed a pretty fucked-up way to kill someone that nobody would want to be stuck in. The huge iron lips and rusty rivets of the device are probably one of the few times the film's ultra-grungy visual approach actually works the way the film's creators clearly intended.
That elaborate gizmo is one of several images from the first “Saw” that went on to become very famous. Maybe that's another reason why Wan's film comes off as sillier now than it did in 2004. In retrospect, “Saw” seems very aware of its own franchise potential. Calling its villain "The Jigsaw Killer" – justified by his unimportant calling card of taking a jigsaw puzzle piece shaped bit of skin from his victims – is the kind of catchy nickname people will remember. The visual of Billy the Puppet – his little suit and tricycle, the spiral patterns on his cheeks, the contrast between his ridiculously gravelly voice and cartoonish appearance – seems like an obvious attempt to reverse engineer a horror movie image as iconic as Jason's hockey mask or Freddy Krueger's glove. If merchandisers and fans didn't immediately latch onto that, “Saw” also includes a literal mask that could be turned into a Halloween costume. That would be yet another obvious steal from the Nine Inch Nails' “Closer” video, in a pig head with greasy long hair and an executioner's robe. I wouldn't assume that Wan and Whannall had any idea that such a long running, profitable series would emerge from their indie film. At the same time, every horror nerd dreams about creating their own Michael Myers or Chucky, a character that gets carved onto the Mount Rushmore of horror fan favorites. The possibility probably wasn't too far from their minds then.
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