The Killer Who Never Was: Complex Storytelling, the Saw Saga and the Shifting Moral Alignment of Puzzle Film Horror

Abstract

As of 2013, Lionsgate’s series of Saw films stands as the most commercially successful horror movie franchise to date. Its seven entries, each released yearly around the Halloween period beginning in 2004 and ending in 2010, have grossed over $873 million at the worldwide box office. Despite its commercial prominence in contemporary American cinema, few scholarly works have ventured into the world of Saw and its unique stylistic and structural identity. A small number of scholars, most notably Kim Newman and Matt Hills, have attempted to position this particular series in relation to broader generic or sociological concerns, the latter examining the extent to which the films ‘can be interpreted as being “about” contemporary political and cultural contexts’ (Hills 2011, 107).¹ For reasons presumably concerned with the cultural distaste surrounding a series whose primary audience ‘must’ comprise, as film critic Mark Kermode argues, ‘either people who appreciate its lack of quality or glutton[s] for punishment’, (2011, 182) the Saw films themselves remain largely bereft of any substantial critical investigation. The exception is Steve Jones’ work, which suggests that the lack of critical attention paid to these films is emblematic of the ‘various prejudices about popular violent cinema’ (2013, 2). Jones believes that the ‘majority of detractors have failed to adequately engage with the films’ content’ (2).