The noughties were naughty – a synonymous homonym for a time when gore became the norm form for more. That’s a lot of tongue twisters – and speaking of twisting tongues, boy the human body is malleable!
Have you ever sneezed too hard and hurt your back? Bitten down too enthusiastically on a big, beautiful sandwich and instead of soft, tender bread you’ve found the inside of your own cheek between your teeth? Tripped on what you were sure was flat ground and fallen over in front of everyone else waiting for the Northern Line? Me too. Except for that last one, and even if it did happen I would have handled it really well and probably nobody even saw.
We take for granted the simple human processes that make up our day, trusting in the implicit sanctity afforded by our bodies. We become bored by the banal survival of knowing that next week you will be just as whole as you are now. But the fact is that a million different physical functions can and do fail constantly.
To be reminded of that is unpleasant – like when you become aware of your own breathing and start doing it manually. In, and then out. Or is it out, and then in? What if you stopped and it didn’t return to automatic function? As a child I spent a lot of nights trying to convince myself to go to sleep, even though I was sure that once consciousness was lost, it might not return. So the last thing that little me wanted to see on screen was a reminder of this frailty.
Horror movies were a no, thank you. I knew they existed and desired to learn no more. Descriptions from the braver children were not appreciated – trying to freak me out before naptime so that I lose at sleeping lions, a coward’s strategy.
The occasional glimpses, however, would slip into my field of vision. Watching ad breaks on TV (remember those?) and having mere frames of Final Destination 3 intrude on what was otherwise a calm evening of programming on E4. As it dawned on me that I was about to be exposed to 30 seconds of scary, I would consider looking away, for fear that they would only worsen my sleeplessness. But I didn’t, or maybe couldn’t. No matter what the specific example was, the sense of impending terror beckoned me to the CRT screen.
DVD covers, too, had a similar power over me – their mere presence making each trip to Blockbuster video a potential minefield of excitement. I don’t remember exactly how Blockbuster structured their layout, but I imagine those DVDs held up on a high shelf, understandably for height restriction purposes. (Joke’s on them though because I’m tall now and Blockbuster doesn’t even exist.) But there was a real appeal in the videos that seemed held away from me - restricted or deemed controversial.
Of course, Blockbuster wasn’t exactly the place for that – an overtly traditional, conservative business that would provide sanitised cuts of age-restricted content to maintain the family-friendly quality that has made the company such an enduring success in the years since. But nevertheless the cover art remained, a totemic reminder of something more, something further. Watching them years later has often felt like a letdown, like they never quite lived up to the mystique I had built in my mind over the years.
I was once offered the chance to watch Eli Roth’s Hostel at a friend’s house. We watched Scooby Doo instead - a decision I stand by and would make again. Its cover disturbed me (Hostel, not Scooby Doo) and I was mostly concerned about embarrassing myself in front of my friend by becoming too scared. I waited another 12 years before actually watching it, and found it far less brutal in relative terms than it had been in my much younger brain.
I was ready to be terrified and disturbed at the age of 22 in the same way I was afraid to be at 10. But it was too immediately similar to the teen comedy Eurotrip (2004) to spook me in the way I’d hoped. Images in isolation were unsettling, and there are those that still feel fresh in my mind because of how arresting they were. Yet it never reached the impossible level of depravity I had been warned of. The promise of video’s cover, and its forbidden nature, could never be satisfied.
Which brings me to my question (AKA I want to play a game) – are the films of 00s gore as shockingly brutal as they were suggested to be, or are we doing them a disservice by relegating them to the stigmatised niche of torture porn?
I was once interrogated by a friend about my choice to watch the Saw series. In her mind, the decision not only required explanation, but was inexplicable. The distance between what she thought of me as a person, and what she thought of those films was too great for her to reconcile. The conclusion she initially came to was not that her image of those films was misguided, affected by the mystique of their restriction when we were children, and reinforced by an increasingly conservative mainstream access to genre throughout the 2010s. But rather that her image of me was wrong. That she had so misjudged me over the last decade, and my consumption, and enjoyment, of media like that was a revelatory moment. I had shown myself to, in fact, be deeply disturbed. Am I? And if so, is this the cause? Or the result? I’m not sure I can answer those, of course, I’m biased.
I’m suspicious of Saw being treated as the cause of violent perversion. If that were the case, wouldn’t we be able to see a steep rise in Jigsaw-style vigilantes circa 2004? From a cursory google search, I’m seeing very few John Kramer copycats. On the other hand, torture wasn’t exactly absent from the zeitgeist either.
In March of 2004, Abu Ghraib housed 7,490 prisoners, and Guantanamo Bay would go on to detain a total of 780 individuals after it opened as a military camp in January 2002. But we’ll get to that at a later date. For now, I merely wish to suggest that if unmentionable torture had been occurring, it was through an institutionalised apparatus, rather than the mad exploits of one man without health insurance.
This isn’t to say that Saw can’t attract such people – it did so even during production of the original 10 minute short that spawned the franchise. Production designer Stewart Prain.
One of the more enduring images of the franchise is the reverse bear trap, attached to its victim’s head and designed to release outwards on a trigger, ripping mandible from skull. Of course, it’s not actually designed to do that – it’s probably made of styrofoam and cardboard, right? You could probably recreate it at home with some pipe cleaners and glue, right? Not right. Wrong, in fact.
Due to their limited budget, the trap had to be created with existing mechanical parts AKA an actual bear trap. Its rusted steel was likely a health hazard in the first place, but according to Wan, it boasted the added danger of being able to entirely rip a person’s jaw open.
Even with the lighter aluminium frame used in the feature length Saw, actor Shawnee Smith struggled with its weight. It’s fair to say that Leigh Whannell has an unusually strong and dense neck to have withstood the original hunk of metal.
Stewart Prain was the man responsible for this – a genius engineer who clearly felt a strong affinity for Jigsaw. I can only imagine the look of disappointment on his face when he was told his creation wouldn’t get to live out its destiny. Prain would have had to come home, hat in hand, and explain to his family that his bosses didn’t respect him enough to let him murder someone on camera. One wrong move and this saga may never have got the chance to live.
Given this was where the most tangible danger could be found, the short film Saw (2003) seems the best place to start on the nu-grindhouse movement’s ascension to popular appeal. This was before Saw was Saw, when it was just two guys finding the dirtiest warehouse space they could get their hands on and filling it with fake blood until it was just an unhygienic slip-and-slide.
The blueprints are here – literally, in some moments. Jigsaw’s designs are splayed out over a table and scanned over by the inquisitive camera. The mechanised sketches double as disturbing building blocks for both its villain and its filmmakers, reflecting the unpolished, jagged edges of the franchise to come. Static lines wash in and out between two scenes. The first is a police interview with Jigsaw victim David (Leigh Whannell), having survived a hellish experience shown in flashbacks.
David, a hospital orderly and constant smoker, brushes off a nurse’s reminder that cigarettes will kill you. “Living’s overrated,” he says, dragging some 90s nihilism into the 21st century. The doom generation’s existential apathy is out of fashion though, and as he continues to blast pounding music through his Walkman, his cynicism appears performative. Is he sure he doesn’t care about his life? Would he really not fight to survive? Jigsaw will form the referendum on these questions, and push him to the brink.
The short lacks some of the fright of the feature films - David’s initial capture is just a slow push-in from behind, a tap on the shoulder and a bonk on the head. Being bonked on your noggin is terrifying, obviously. But I think if that had been the core element for Whannell and Wan going forward, Saw wouldn’t have captured the imaginations of the sickos quite as effectively.
The green tinge of the dungeon sequence brings in some of the colour palette to come, bathing David in a sickly glow. Wan displays some trademark unevenly barbed cuts, spinning around Whannell and switching from close to medium and back. The jagged structure elicits David’s dawning terror as he finds himself inserted into his (apparently fully-functional) rusted metal headgear. His blood-soaked shirt hints at the violent struggle it must have been to get his unconscious body attached to the mechanism.
The TV turns on, revealing famous Jigsaw-proxy and tricycle enthusiast Billy the Puppet in all his glory. The building suspense may be killed for those already familiar with the franchise though, as this Jigsaw’s whisper-growl sounds like a bad impression, lacking the same ease of gravitas that Tobin Bell finds. But he still wants to play a game.
David vibrates with fear, as he throws his head back and forth in desperation. Quick flashes, which were once lightning but resemble artificial light, intermittently illuminate his panic. Something that will define the early entries of this series is its frugal ability to cut corners creatively. There is very little material action in the physical space of the scene, and yet the lens injects a frenetic chaos.
Despite its reputation for focusing on the body, a lot of the franchise’s disturbance comes from the camera. David finds his dead cellmate, faced with the impossible choice of either sacrificing his life when the beartrap’s timer expires, or cutting into this other person to find the key to release him. Only his choice is actually more impossible than he thought. His cellmate is still alive. He’s being pushed even further to choose to survive. His blood soaked hands and the shadows of his stabs are all that we see of his act of violence. Living isn’t so overrated, David has decided.
Most people are so ungrateful to be alive. But not you. Not anymore.
Is this torture an overreaction to a man’s choice to smoke and be annoying about it? Almost definitely. Would Jigsaw’s time be better spent targeting Big Cigarette, Mr Marlboro or Joe Camel rather than a single hospital orderly? Also yes. But the life-affirming torturer, and his creators Wan and Whannell, are still figuring things out.
Wan and Whannell’s initial intention was to produce the film independently, imagining a very constricted single-location thriller. But as it expanded beyond the chamber-piece mystery it was originally envisioned as, the pair sought production partners in Australia. Finding no luck there, they instead looked to Hollywood. As a proof of concept, they brought this short with them, shot for $5,000. It was enough to impress Mark Burg, Oren Koules, and Gregg Hoffman of Evolution Entertainment, whose horror division Twisted Pictures was born off the back of the franchise.
Their production budget for the feature was between $1-1.2 million, and its worldwide gross (gross) of $103 million made it the most profitable horror movie since Scream (1996). The franchise would ultimately gross (gross) over $1 billion, soon to be more. Can any film series claim to remain fringe or radical when putting up these numbers?
Next Up: Hostel, in which all your interrailing nightmares are realised.