Let the Game Begin: “Saw” at 20 | Features

In the early 2000s, it was James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s smash hit “Saw” that was credited (or by less generous critics, blamed) for helping popularize the prevalence of so-called “torture porn.” Raw, visceral, and scrappy, the low-budget cop thriller captivated audiences with its jarring, nightmarish torture sequences, going on to spawn ten sequels (and counting), video games, a whole slew of parodies, and a new horror icon in Billy the Puppet. But as writers, directors, stars, and subplots have come and gone, editor Kevin Greutert has remained the lifeblood of “Saw,” lending the franchise its signature breakneck pacing and frenetic, high-octane editing. 

The brainchild of Australian film students James Wan and Leigh Whannell, “Saw” is a 2004 horror-thriller that follows the cat-and-mouse game between police and the “Jigsaw Killer,” who abducts his victims and places them in deadly “tests.” Told in an intricate, interwoven series of overlapping nonlinear subplots, Cary Elwes’ Dr. Lawrence Gordon and Leigh Whannell’s Adam are at the center of it all, who wake up chained to pipes at opposite ends of a dirty bathroom with a bloody corpse between them. 

It’s a messy, violent, claustrophobic film with a whopper of a twist ending, but it’s in the edit where “Saw” truly comes together, as Greutert told Letterboxd in an interview last year. At a modest hour and 43 minutes, the film races by at a near headache-inducing pace, which Greutert says is by design: “James Wan talked often about the idea of ‘Never be boring,’ which sounds obvious, but … I think we try harder than the average film to make sure that it moves. Every cut that I make, there’s a really strong reason behind it, even if it’s a very short clip, which it usually is in a “Saw” movie.”

What’s most remarkable about the prevalence and influence of Saw’s trap sequences in horror (and pop culture at large) is how comparatively little of the film’s runtime they actually consume. When you think “Saw,” you think gruesome traps, buckets of blood, and stomach-churning display of body horror, but “Saw” on the page is mostly a cop procedural following the cat-and-mouse game a serial killer is playing with police, a la “Se7en”. It’s a chilling chamber drama built around the strength of Cary Elwes’ performance, an eerie slow burn creeping towards a jaw-dropping twist (“Game over”), just one that happens to be dappled with an extra pinch of brutality.

But while the brutality may come in small, concentrated doses (at least, in the original “Saw”), the twisted innovation of Wan’s trap designs combined with Greutert’s chaotic, fast-paced editing gives way to the singularly anxiety-inducing experience of watching someone trying to desperately hack and slash their way out of a Jigsaw trap. And though the franchise has no shortage of spine-chilling traps that highlight Greurert’s penchant for rapid-fire cuts, reusing footage, and breaking continuity, no trap is a better showcase of Greurert’s distinctive style editing the “Saw” films than the nightmare that started it all, the reverse bear trap. 

Worn by Shawnee Smith’s ill-fated heroine Amanda, the reverse bear trap is the first time we witness one of Jigsaw’s aberrant creations at work in real-time, rendered in acute detail as Doctor Gordon and the audience watch Amanda recount the experience to the police. Created by Stuart Prain and redesigned by Wan and special effects supervisor Thomas Bellissimo, the reverse bear trap is frightening enough on its own merit — even in a vacuum, watching it spring open and shred the head of a styrofoam dummy is cringe-inducing.

But Amanda isn’t in a vacuum. She’s waking up groggy and tied to a chair in production designer Julie Berghoff’s grimy, filth-ridden world with the taste of “blood and metal” in her mouth — and when the countdown starts, “Saw” kicks into high gear. As Smith writhes and struggles, the camera whips in dizzying, discordant circles, quick cuts, and sudden zooms flying by as nu metal blares. 

In Jigsaw’s games, time moves differently, and Greutert extends the length of a minute as excruciatingly as possible, speeding up and slowing down footage, reusing and intercutting clips over themselves to make 60 seconds feel like a lifetime. But just when it seems the nightmare will never end, the trap is over as quickly as it began, and Greutert’s outlandish proclivities return to the back burner until another victim needs punishing. 

As one of the progenitors of the “torture porn” subgenre, the franchise is often accused of relishing in excessive violence in substitution of story — and though that’s certainly true of some of the later installments, Greutert and Wan’s use of gore in the first “Saw” is deliberate and paired-back by necessity. 

While later special editions and director’s cuts feature ample carnage, the original theatrical cut of “Saw” relies on the shock value of self-mutilation and the strength of Cary Elwes’ and Shawnee Smith’s performances in lieu of a tidal wave of blood. There are splashes of blood as Amanda digs around for the key to her freedom in a man’s stomach or Doctor Gordon hacks off his foot, but it’s the pacing, the sense of desperation, not the carnage that makes “Saw”s early traps so terrifying. 

Granted, not all “Saw” films are created equal. Once Leigh Whannell departs as a writer after “Saw III,” the franchise begins to earn its current reputation for excess — excessive plot twists, excessive gore, and excessive flashbacks. But even if “Saw”s 4-9 are more hit-and-miss than earlier installments, even the weaker entries have their charms and cult followings, thanks in large part to Greutert, who remains with the franchise as editor on all but one of the “Saw” films. 

Though the nuances and novelties that made the first “Saw” such a groundbreaking piece of horror filmmaking begin to wane as the series lurches on, Greutert continues to deliver the kind of maximum velocity, in-your-face editing that made the early trap sequences so memorable, but cranked to eleven. Transitions become so outlandish they border on comical, as if the franchise itself is aware of how unraveled and interwoven its story spools have become and has instead decided to commit wholeheartedly to spectacle — hence “Saw 3D”. 

Not to undersell the importance of Greutert’s presence to the DNA of the “Saw” series, it’s worth mentioning that “Spiral: From the Book of Saw,” the “Saw” movie that looks and feels least like the franchise’s house style, is the only installment on which Greutert didn’t serve as primary editor. When Greutert finally returned to the director’s chair (and the editor’s suite) with “Saw X,” it was to usher the series into what could optimistically be called a new golden age. 

Under Greutert’s direction, “Saw X” opened to the best critical reception in the franchise’s history and a formidable showing at the box office. But beyond guiding the “Saw” films back to the most critically well-received and culturally relevant as they’ve ever been, “Saw X” is also a testament to how spending decades in Jigsaw’s grimy green world has equipped to understand the pulse, tone, and innards of a “Saw” film in the way few others do.

It’s his intense familiarity with the franchise that made “Saw X” such a success with longtime fans in particular—Greutert nestles the narrative squarely in the middle of “Saw”s messy timeline just as prior entries have, but actively works to subvert the tropes and plot twists fans have come to expect from the films. 

Especially in a moviegoing landscape where so-called “elevated horror” is becoming the status quo, it’s worth wondering how a scrappy franchise that seemingly epitomizes a subgenre that fell out of vogue 10 years ago is continuing to find success. Even if it struggles narratively, the “Saw” franchise (with Kevin Greutert at the helm) continues to prove itself the cockroach of the horror world, churning out bold, brazen, bloody new installments with no end in sight.