How Saw Changed the Game: Celebrating Jigsaw 10 Years Later
Scott Hallam
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In 2004 writer/director James Wan absolutely exploded on the horror scene when he unleashed Saw on unsuspecting audiences worldwide. And it can honestly be said that after Saw hit, horror was never the same again.
What exactly did Wan bring to the table with his inaugural smash hit? What was it about Saw that made it the phenomenon it became? What turned it into a household name? There have been plenty of horror movies that have come out between 2004 and now. What made Saw the one that intrigued audiences enough to draw them in for a $100 million take at the box office (on a budget of just over $1 million) and inspired a franchise that would go on to gross nearly $1 billion?
As Saw was released in October 2004, a look back at some of the big name horror films released in 2003 is very telling. Although 2003 saw the release of cool movies like High Tension (Haute Tension), Underworld and Wrong Turn, for the most part we were in a pretty serious dry spell for unique horror stories.
Instead of great new movies, we were getting nothing but sequels like Beyond Re-Animator, Final Destination 2, Freddy vs. Jason, Jeepers Creepers 2, Mimic 3: Sentinel, Puppet Master: The Legacy and, god help us, Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood. And if it wasn’t a sequel, it was a remake with films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Willard seeing re-launch in 2003…or an outright overhyped stinker like Darkness Falls.
Looking at this line-up, it goes without saying that horror needed an adrenaline injection in the worst way… and then along came Saw.
Prior to the release of the movie, the marketing campaign for Saw was absolutely brilliant. And oftentimes a good trailer is all you need to make money in the horror genre. There have been plenty of movies that have blown the doors off the box office just by having a kick-ass trailer, even with no substance to the film itself. In the case of the original Saw, not only did you have a stunning preview, you had a fantastic movie to back up the marketing campaign.
The trailer was fantastically memorable, especially Cary Elwes’ chilling quote, “He doesn’t want us to cut through our chains. He wants us to cut through our feet.” That line, coupled with the imagery of him sawing through something later on, was enough to send horror fans flocking to theaters to see just how extreme Saw could be… and they weren’t disappointed. The extremely graphic nature of the movie, in addition to its phenomenal, shocking ending, left audiences craving more Saw, and they would get plenty in the years to come.
One of the best ways to judge how much impact a movie has on its genre is to look at what comes shortly after. With Saw it was easy to see how it affected horror. In 2005, one year after Saw was released, Eli Roth brought us Hostel, and the two films would quickly be grouped together to represent a new sub-genre of horror grossly misnamed “torture porn.” It’s an unfortunate moniker for an outstanding new breed of horror. Filmmakers like Wan and Roth realized that horror fans were no longer susceptible to the scares they’d been exposed to for decades. They expected things to jump out from the shadows, and they expected the killer to come back from the dead at least once during the climax of the film. Movies like Saw, and the films it inspired, took an entirely new approach to disturbing audiences: the infliction of pain.
And the parade of movies that followed in the footsteps of Saw soon began. In addition to Hostel, in the coming years we would soon see multiple sequels to both it and Saw, and by 2007 the intensity of horror had quickly risen exponentially with movies like Inside, Frontiere(s), The Girl Next Door, Donkey Punch, The Wizard of Gore remake and the chilling indie August Underground: Penance, all coming out in ’07. The bar had been raised, and it continued in 2008 with such films as Martyrs and Deadgirl coming out, just to name a couple. Horror had officially been intensified.
And it continues today, 10 years later. It’s the films that fall in line with this change that generate the most buzz in the genre. The Soska Sisters have a great gritty feel to their movies, especially American Mary; Tom Sixx really turned things up with his Human Centipede series; and movies like A Serbian Film, Antichrist and the Maniac and Evil Dead remakes, as well as anthologies like V/H/S and ABC’s of Death, have kept the extreme horror torch lit.
Saw raised the bar 10 years ago, and we can’t thank James Wan enough for that. Here’s hoping more films continue to fall in line with the intensity of Saw, and horror audiences will rejoice!
Categorized:News Retrospectives
