He saw ‘Saw’ From The Start: The Historic Career of Director Kevin Greutert
When Saw XI was taken off of the 2025 release calendar, I immediately thought of my friend Kevin Greutert. A longtime horror movie director/editor whose career traces back all the way to the first Saw (2004), Greutert’s oeuvre is inextricably linked to one of horror’s most venerable franchises. His is the vantage point of an editor-turned-director, initially remote from the actors whose narratives he shapes and later charged with being their leader.
Yet Greutert’s career includes much more than the story of John Kramer (Tobin Bell), the so-called Jigsaw Killer, and his disciples. As I learned during our wide-ranging interview, his favorites among the films in which he was involved are Saw II (2005), The Strangers (2008), and Barbarian (2020). Mine include not only a Saw installment (the pro-Obamacare Saw VI, which I discussed at length with Greutert at Sarah Lawrence College in 2023), but also a Gothic-style supernatural drama set in the Louisiana bayous, Jessabelle (2014), starring Sarah Snook from Succession, a movie I recommend with copious quantities of Popeyes friend chicken and Louisiana Tradition Bourbon Whiskey (Greutert agrees), and Visions (2015), a thought-provoking supernatural thriller with a wickedly clever twist, bang-up performances by Isla Fisher and Gillian Jacobs and copious lush imagery of California wine country.
Perhaps this is why, as I reviewed Greutert’s career, I gradually realized that the life of a film director/editor requires the same set of skills used by the most interesting horror movie antagonists, although all but the most corrupt directors and editors aren’t literally evil. You have to hustle, to seize opportunities as they come to you, and think fast on your feet. At the same time, you have to play the long game, building a career piece by piece with a view of how all of them will fit together into what could retroactively be considered a master plan.
This brings me to the first theme I noticed when asking Greutert about his two-decade-plus career.
His first real editing job was the original Saw
Greutert recalled that his first real editing job on a movie was for The Shot (1996), an extremely low-budget comedy ($28,000) that included cameos from Dana Carvey and Ted Raimi. Yet he added, “Saw was the first real editing job that I got. Man, it was an absolutely amazing experience.” Describing director James Wan as “brilliant” with “incredible editing skills and mastery of all other aspects of cinema language,” Greutert recalled driving the movie up to Park City so it could be shown at the famous Sundance Movie Festival.
“It went over really well and Lionsgate agreed to distribute the movie, so it really changed my life in a huge way,” Greutert said. So, how did he land his transformative first gig? As it turned out, he learned at that Sundance premiere that he owes everything to his even-keeled temperament and a well-received gag reel he edited while working on Disney’s 2003 family comedy, George of the Jungle 2.
“After the movie premiered, my wife Elizabeth was talking to Gregg Hoffman, and she’s like, so why didn’t you hire Kevin? You know, he had no experience,” Greutert said. “He said that gag reel that he did for George of the Jungle 2, and then just my temperament, is what he said. So, a gag reel and my temperament made my career.”
Because You Were Home: Working On The Strangers
Unfortunately, serendipity is a fickle mistress: She can bring joy, but also aggravation. For instance, while Greutert describes The Strangers as among the best movies he has worked on, it also includes some of his most stressful production memories. When one watches The Strangers, one can see the unremittingly dark tone and bleakly accurate characterizations that Greutert praises.
Yet by the time he had the opportunity to work on The Strangers, the first Saw trilogy had boomed at the box office, and the producers wanted Greutert to help them with the next one. He had already committed to The Strangers, “and frankly, I really wanted to do it because I liked the script and I wanted to do something different,” so he declined the offer. As things turned out, however, Saw IV (2007) needed a lot of work; its director, Darren Lynn Bousman, had had to split duties between that and his future cult classic, Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008).
“I truly didn’t know where Saw IV could go,” Greutert admitted, looking back on the talk among the filmmakers and producers at the time. “At that time, there was no script and nobody knew what it would be, just that they wanted to keep the franchise going.” Eventually, the producers persuaded Greutert to come back and do an editing pass on their upcoming movie, which he could do—albeit in a tremendous rush—because he had just finished editing The Strangers. “I did my cut, and the studio and the producers were very happy about how it landed.”
A Return to Saw
Now that it was clear Lionsgate would churn out a new Saw sequel every Halloween until the series stopped being profitable, Greutert took the initiative: He asked the producers to allow him to direct Saw VI if he was to return and edit Saw V (2008). The producers agreed, and he wound up having a great time both editing Saw V and Saw VI. Yet even though Greutert owes his directorial debut to his decision to be proactive about his own future, he eventually learned that in Hollywood, there are always more powerful forces that can shape your destiny.
In his case, Greutert learned this during the heartbreaking ordeal of almost directing Paranormal Activity 2 (2010). He recalled seeing the first Paranormal Activity (2009) in theaters and being so impressed, he soon worried it would bite into Saw VI’s box office (which it did). Despite this potential cause for competitiveness, Greutert nevertheless jumped when he was offered the opportunity to direct the clever movie’s sequel. Forces operating behind the scenes, however, ultimately denied him this passion project.
“When Saw VI came out, it didn’t do well at the box office, and I didn’t hear anything from the producers or the studio after it came out,” Greutert recalled. Assuming they were disappointed, Greutert was not surprised that they hired Saw V director David Hackl to direct Saw 3D (2010). He was delighted that Paramount and Blumhouse liked the ideas he pitched for Paranormal Activity 2 and that they allowed him to hire a writer friend, Michael Perry, to help with the script. The Saw producers were even poised to release Greutert from an option agreement, saying that he could not work on another project if there was one they wanted him to do for them instead.
They did this, that is, until they learned in the trades that Paranormal Activity 2 would compete with Saw 3D at the Halloween 2010 box office. Subsequently, they exercised the option, and the rest is history: Greutert had to leave Paranormal Activity 2 and return to the Saw franchise.
Enter the Jackal
Saw 3D was not the last movie Greutert worked on that reminded him of the film industry’s capriciousness. Jackals (2017), which Greutert directed based on a script by Jared Rivet, is an intense character study mixed with a horror thriller template, examining a family as they try to deprogram one of their own who has joined a violent cult. The nihilistic and grim tone is quite effective, but Greutert believes the movie failed at the box office because he simply didn’t get enough time, money, and creative freedom to do it right.
“We shot it for well under one million dollars in 15 nights,” Greutert said. “I wish we had more time. One of the most critical aspects of making a quality film is that you need a minimum number of days to do your shoot, and if you don’t get those, there’s so much opportunity for things to go wrong. If you don’t get a scene the way you want it, there isn’t an opportunity to go back and reshoot it, or rewrite, or do anything like that.”
Greutert also struggled with the production process of the 2023 Seth Rogen-produced Cobweb, which was made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even though I went into an editing room in Hollywood, the entire floor was empty, and I was working with [director] Samuel Bodin through the equivalent of Zoom, as he was living in France doing it. It was awkward technically because of the time jump, and then just only ever, like, I never met him in person. I think I worked on it for maybe nine months on and off.”
Beauty Amongst The Chaos
While the process of creating art is undeniably stressful, there is also beauty amidst the chaos. Take the story of how Greutert married his wife, Elizabeth.
“They didn’t really even have a plan for Saw II until Saw came out,” Greutert said. “And then we just had to really scramble to write it and find a director” (ultimately Bousman). Yet Greutert had already planned his wedding for Memorial Day, which fell at the end of May 2005. This made it quite inconvenient when he learned that he had to be in Toronto around that time for filming.
“In the middle of the shoot, I had to jump on a plane to Los Angeles, pick up my wife, drive her three hours north to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Central California where I have 40 acres of forest land where I built a stage for the wedding prior to going to Toronto to shoot Saw II, got married, saw all my family and friends, and had an amazing party…. and then blasted back to Toronto, got back in the editing chair and continued to edit.”
By the time Saw III rolled around, Greutert was so familiar with the series that he could treat its lore as if it were Shakespearean literature. “For Saw III, it really felt like we had figured out just what this franchise was, and we saw where the audience really responded to the characters.” This allowed them to flesh out the character of Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), turning her from a mere victim in the first two installments into a three-dimensional antihero in the third. Even better than crafting their own Lady Macbeth, Greutert and company approached the stories of the first two movies as if they were writing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play spinning off from William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (circa 1600).
“For me and Darren and all of them, it was this idea of going back to Saw and Saw II and showing the setup, showing that Amanda was participating with John as he set up the events of those movies. And so rebuilding those sets and seeing what’s happening, it was a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead of Saw and Saw II. It was really, really cool.”
Greutert experienced this sense of fun repeatedly throughout his career. The 2007 movie The Thirst, which told the story of drug addicts who decide to become vampires, stands out in his memory because he had fun working with director Jeremy Kasten and producer Mark Altman. Similarly, he fondly recalls his time on The Collection (2012) because he got to work closely with his friends who directed and co-wrote it, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton.
Heading South With Jessabelle
Then there is Jessabelle, a Twilight Zone-esque story of a young woman who attempts to rebuild a trauma-filled life by returning to the rural Louisiana community where she grew up. As I told Greutert during our interview, I’ve rewatched Jessabelle many times because it does such a beautiful job of evoking Southern culture and creating an immersive world. It is rare for a horror movie, in my experience, to feel so much like a densely-layered Southern melodrama.
“Growing up as a teenager and in my twenties, my favorite writer was William Faulkner,” Greutert said. “But I’d never been to the South, and so I didn’t really have that much of an image of it in my head, despite having at least seen films that take place in that area. So the first time I went to Louisiana was when we were scouting locations for where to shoot Jessabelle. I was like, okay, this kind of matches what I had in my mind about it, but until you’re really there, you just don’t know. It gave me my first opportunity to really check out the South. And we saw so many amazing locations in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge area. There’s just an insane number of Antebellum plantation houses and swamps and bayous and all that. It’s incredible.”
When it came time to make a final decision, however, Greutert decided to replicate the look of the region without actually filming there.
“Our problem, though, was that New Orleans is a very hot place to shoot a movie, and we determined that we weren’t really going to be able to hire a good crew because they were all already taken up by other films,” Greutert said. “We broke off our location scout, two-thirds of the way through it, and went up to Wilmington, North Carolina, which is still the South, but the general look of it is quite different. We had to sort of stretch what our view of what Louisiana could be, and we found enough swampy bayou area to pass for those kinds of locations.”
Similarly, he explained, “We found this brick house that doesn’t exactly look like Louisiana, but is still a plantation house from that era that we were able to adapt. At the end of the day, we were trying very hard to make it sound and feel like Louisiana. We put a lot of work into the bird sounds and the accuracy of what you would hear in Louisiana.”
Getting Close With Leatherface
Greutert repeated this feat of creating a Southern and Gothic ambiance in a movie made somewhere else with Leatherface, a 2017 prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013). While Jessabelle was at least shot in the Southern United States, Leatherface wasn’t even filmed in America. To tell its origin story of the iconic Leatherface character, the filmmakers went all the way to Bulgaria.
“It was shot by two French dudes in Bulgaria and the place where we shot it was an ex-Soviet propaganda film studio,” Greutert said. “I really liked those five actors who played the youths in those roles. And I love that they were on a road trip.” The chemistry between the five leads (Vanessa Grasse, Sam Strike, James Bloor, Jessica Madsen, and Sam Coleman) drives the movie. With some sheepishness, I even admitted to Greutert that I strongly identify with Bud (Coleman) because we are both men who struggle with our mental health and have been abused by powerful people in the American system. Yet those same interesting characters also created a problem for the real-life humans crafting Leatherface; the writer intended for the movie to misdirect viewers as to the titular character’s identity, and Greutert, as an editor, needed to help pull off that feat.
“The pieces weren’t really in place for making that misdirect happen, and we really spent a lot of time trying to make it work,” Greutert said. “My impulse was to just downplay the importance of that misdirect and just with the idea that we’re watching [Leatherface] evolve into a monster.”
A Saw Resurrection
In addition to seeing the revival of the Leatherface character, 2017 was also the year that the Saw franchise was resurrected from the dead with Jigsaw, although Greutert was not tapped to rehelm the series when that film was made.
“I met the directors, two identical twins, Peter and Michael Spierig, Australian guys, and I really liked them,” Greutert said. “So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do this. I have to sort of swallow my pride a bit, because I’m not going to be directing, even though I’ve directed the last two films in this series. But you know what, there is something to be said for editing in terms of life quality. Because directing is all-consuming, but while editing, I’m kind of in my happy place when I’m by myself in a cutting room, or with just some directors, that sort of thing.”
Getting Political In His Films
As I’ve written before, horror movies are notable as a genre that provides lots of social commentary. This is particularly true in Greutert’s filmography, including the movie that stands out as my favorite from his oeuvre. It is the only movie for which I’ve ever been polled by a CinemaScore research market firm (I gave it an “A” from the Manhattan cineplex I frequented), and Greutert and I bonded when I reviewed it for my personal website. The premise is simple, elegant, and beautiful: Health insurance executives must survive Jigsaw traps based on the same perverse logic they use to create real-life death panels through their policies. While things are certainly better now than they were in 2009 — and this is entirely because of President Barack Obama’s success in passing the Affordable Care Act — President Donald Trump aims to repeal the protections that Obama helped implement.
For these reasons, Saw VI is without question Greutert’s most explicitly political movie. Viewed through the prism of contemporary politics, it poignantly reminds us of the human toll that occurs when capitalism remains unregulated. Trump and his fellow conservatives preach a dogma of free market capitalism, but ordinary people are unable to receive necessary medical treatment because of their ideology. Saw VI shows the perspective of both these doomed patients (including Kramer himself) and of the health insurance executives. To Greutert’s credit, they are not demonized; he sees their humanity, and in so doing, more effectively underscores the banality of their evil. When they are harshly judged, the audience both squirms at their pain and understands Kramer’s underlying murderous logic.
Another 6: Editing Room 6
There are also metaphysical themes in the other Greutert-edited movie to end with a number 6, Room 6 (2006). Starring Christine Taylor of Hey Dude and Zoolander fame, Room 6 is about a haunted hospital in which scantily clad nurses mix with sadistic surgeons to torture potentially damned souls. Despite its campy trappings, however, Room 6 dwells upon deeper existential themes involving life, death, and the meaning of everything that occurs in between.
“All of my memories of working on that are very positive,” Greutert said. “It was an edit when I was introduced to Michael [Hurst], the director, and so I came onto it and just really had fun going in and playing with the story, playing with the editing style. It was only about three weeks of work, which is somewhat common for me when I go in and do a polish on an edit. But I agree there is something really fun about it. Christine Taylor, I think, is underrated. She played Marsha Brady in the Brady Bunch movies and then shifted over to this. I thought that, just as a scream queen, she did a really good job.”
Offering insight into the day-to-day routine of an editor, Greutert observed that “as both a director and editor of horror films, there are people, actresses, and actors that just aren’t comfortable with the amount of physicality that’s involved in expressing fear and terror and screams in particular. Some actresses are very self-conscious, and they don’t want to necessarily throw themselves all the way into it.” By contrast, Greutert never had to worry about cutting to Taylor screaming.
Indeed, Room 6 contains a memorable cut that would reappear more than a decade later. When a major character dies at the film’s end, Greutert decided to fade to all white as a way of symbolizing that this person is passing on to a better world. Instead of cutting to black, Greutert mused, we could fade to white to give viewers a sense of hope about where this character would wind up in the afterlife. (Greutert, for his part, doesn’t believe in it; this author is stubbornly Jewish on the subject.) Sensing that Saw X might be his final movie with Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw (an intuition that proved prophetic), Greutert decided to end that story with a similar fade to white.
A Penchant for Projects with Strong Female Leads
Greutert sees similar deep themes in The Strangers, a movie he respects immensely as directed and written by Bryan Bertino (with whom Greutert worked on the yet-to-be-released Vicious).
“He goes very deep into the drama of it and the realism of the characters,” Greutert said. “His movies have different levels of success in pulling that off. But he would never do something that wasn’t really like The Strangers. There is an artistic integrity there that’s pretty cool. As a writer, he’s very sought after. He has a very spare descriptive style, and he uses a lot of dialogue that is just sort of non-sequitur enough that it feels like real human speech.” Indeed, Bertino’s writing is so good that it forced Greutert to up his editing game.
The Strangers includes a common theme in Greutert’s filmography — strong, intelligent female characters who are irrationally disbelieved by the people around them. In Umma (2022), a little-known gem directed and written by Iris K. Shim and starring Sandra Oh, a Korean American, is haunted by her wrathful and abusive mother, while her daughter and friends dismiss her because she is mentally ill. In Umma Oh’s Amanda faces discrimination because of her mental illness, her ethnicity, her immigrant status, and her sex.
“That film got made, I think, largely because of Oh’s involvement, because I know she really responded well to the script,” Greutert recalled. These themes of sexism, xenophobia, and racism reappear in His House (2020), which was directed and written by Remi Weekes to tell the story of South Sudanese refugees.
“In His House, the characters are refugees from the Sudan. And in the case of Umma, it’s a woman who grew up in Korea and had Korean parents. There’s folklore from both their original cultures that plays into the haunting and the themes of the movies. And we encountered a similar challenge in each one, and we dealt with them differently for those two movies.”
Like Saw VI, His House rings especially true in the Trump era.
“It’s pretty rare for Americans to sit through movies about refugees or families that are forced to leave their home countries and come to America to not only improve their situations, but in many cases to survive at all,” Greutert said. While the South Sudanese refugees in His House go to the United Kingdom instead of the United States, their plight is ultimately the same: They are constantly at risk of being kicked out unless deemed “one of the good ones.”
“Even if one is against all instances of illegal immigration into the US, the utter lack of compassion on the part of too many Americans is shocking,” Greutert said. “Especially since many of the same people who consider ‘illegals’ to be monstrous leeches are the same folks who want to declare our country officially Christian. One of Jesus’ most prominent themes was about protecting the poor, so don’t get me started…”
Greutert trailed off, then continued.
“This is not to say that all countries should simply throw open the gates to whoever is in need or wants to come in,” Greutert said. “But people should recognize the desperation behind why these migrations are occurring, and will continue to occur as the planet heats up and renders entire nations uninhabitable. And most importantly, we should recognize that our hatreds are being stoked by people who want to control us, and too many people are following the words of our modern Hitlers.”
He concluded, “His House is scary, relevant, and compassionate all at the same time.”
Having Visions
The same is true of Visions, although it is less political than Saw VI and His House. In Visions, a woman suffering from PTSD is disbelieved by her husband, friends, and support network when she has preternatural visions at her recently purchased wine vineyards.
“On almost every director’s favorite film list is John Cassavetes’ 1974 movie A Woman Under the Influence,” Greutert explained. “That’s not a horror movie, but it is about a woman who’s mentally breaking down, and her husband is dealing with that—or not dealing with that. It’s powerful material. It’s the idea that someone you love seems to be breaking down or is breaking down, and how that affects your relationship. It affects how you’re feeling of helplessness, for helping them deal with it.”
At its core, Visions is about a woman who is stubbornly not believed, except by other women. Evalehigh Maddox (Isla Fisher) is married to an aspiring horticulturalist, David (Anson Mount), and after a terrible tragedy leaves her traumatized, the now-pregnant Evaleigh joins her husband to fulfill his winemaking dreams. Before they can settle into their new estate, however, Evaleigh observes signs that the new property is haunted—but David, her doctor, and seemingly all but a handful of female friends dismiss her fears as trauma and pregnancy hormones. It is difficult to shake the sense that sexism also plays a subtle role in their attitudes.
The movie also contains an interesting subtext about mental health rights. Throughout the film, people in Evaleigh’s support network who claim to want what’s best for her disregard her when she expresses anxiety about taking antidepressants. Even though this woman supposedly controls her own body, she is repeatedly pressured into making choices with which she feels uncomfortable. Regardless of the other characters’ intentions, these scenes raise valid questions about the extent to which people with seeming mental illnesses are infantilized.
“I liked that the Gillian Jacobs character [Sadie] seems to be the only one that’s listening to Isla’s character,” Gretuert said. “You once asked if I thought it was a feminist film. And you know, I think that yes, there’s a message like that that can be taken away, but it is ironic in a very fun way.” I will not explain why to avoid divulging spoilers, but suffice to say that the biggest winner by the end of Visions is the smug real estate agent who comments that most people who buy seemingly haunted properties are thrilled at their potential resale value.
In addition to the engaging story, which culminates in a twist that holds up due to a plot as thoroughly and intelligently plotted as great thrillers like The Sixth Sense (1999), I’m particularly partial to Visions because of the gorgeous imagery. Like Jessabelle, Visions evokes a strong sense of place, immersing viewers in the sights and culture of California wine country. As it turns out, Greutert is from California, which I suspect is one reason why the movie works so well in this regard.
“It was nice to shoot in Los Angeles, and every once in a while, when I’m in Thousand Oaks, I’ll drive past the winery where we shot it,” Greutert said. “It’s hard to make a moody supernatural movie in a place with such direct sunlight, but we made do. Jackals was shot very close to the same location.”
Spiral: A Saw Movie With A Defund The Police Message
Spiral, the 2021 Saw spinoff directed by Darren Lynn Bousman and starring Chris Rock (and which has the latter’s creative fingerprints all over it), is socially conscious but about a very different issue than women’s rights and mental health. Instead, it’s basically Defund the Police as a Saw movie.
“It’s definitely an old school ‘70s cop movie in many ways, where you’ve got all these corrupt cops doing their thing and getting revenge and all that,” Greutert said, noting that the villain’s motive is to take revenge against the police for their abuse of power. “I think that’s the funnest aspect of that movie.” He added that “I know Chris Rock was originally going to direct it, and then he got pulled away to do one of the seasons of Fargo, to star in it. He was still in Spiral, but wasn’t able to direct it. They brought Darren back and did their whole thing, so by the time they contacted me, they’d already shot and edited the movie, but just wanted some additional editing work on it. So I did the old trek back to Toronto in the middle of winter, did my thing, and walked away again.”
A Brief Stint on Barbarian
Even though Greutert’s work on Barbarian (2022) was equally brief, it left a much greater impact on him, so much so that he ranks it as among the best movies he has ever worked on.
“I only came on briefly to work on Barbarian, to focus on some of the horror scenes, but when I saw it, my jaw dropped,” Greutert said. “I couldn’t believe how cool it was. It has a sort of Pulp Fiction (1994) vibe to the storytelling style, with some discursive scenes that follow minor characters in different directions. You lean into that movie just based on how many original elements it has. And I think it’s very funny in places; Justin Long’s character is a breath of relief after all the stuff that’s come before it. It’s just very, very clever. I think director Zach Cregger is going to be the most famous director in America.”
Characteristically for us, we ended our conversation by discussing future horror movies. With his rich career history, Greutert’s own future is promising. At the same time, he is also optimistic about the rest of Hollywood, and for that reason is eager about both one of his own upcoming projects—Vicious, which he partially edited with The Strangers’ Bertino—and another small role in Cregger’s upcoming project, Weapons.
Despite the turbulence surrounding the making of Saw 3D, though, at least it got made. Tragically for fans of the Saw series, it appears that due to internal issues, Greutert’s Saw XI may never see the light of day. He’s currently pursuing projects that will expand his world beyond the franchise he’s worked on for over twenty years.
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