Chapter One - First Film: Saw (2004)

 

Our first film in Splatterfest feels like the one that started it all: Saw (2004).

The Saw franchise is a modern classic of shock horror. For the uninitiated, it is a film about a killer trapping people he deems 'unworthy' or 'unappreciative' of their life in deadly games of bloodshed. Two men find themselves captives of the Jigsaw Killer's deadly game.

James Wan makes his directorial debut with this film, his later films including Insidious, The Conjuring, Annabelle and (in a strange twist) Aquaman. Writer Leigh Whannell, who would go on to write Insidious, Upgrade, and The Invisible Man (2020), drafted the script with Wan as their first production out of film school. Originally written in 2001, the film would not go on to get made until Twisted Pictures was formed to fund it.

Saw (2004) would go on to make a massive 104 million dollar box office on a small 1.2 million dollar budget (55.1 million in US and Canada). It would go on to make another 70 million dollars with DVD, BluRay and VHS releases. 

That is why we are starting with Saw. It was a mainstream success and it is brutal. While not as outright bloody and 'splashy' with gore like some of its 80's predecessors, the film has such s brutal eye to the depictions of death. 

The pallete is dingy white, putrid brown, and neon green for its nastier sequences giving it a vile visual language for it's horror. It envokes filth, grime, and blood. The blood it shows us is not the hot splash of bright red we are used to from slashers, the heat of the moment kill that makes our heart race. No, Saw shows us old blood, pooled and cold.

It's in the morality of Saw that we see another connection to slashers. Now, instead of the stoner hippie or the horny camp counselor dying, horror movies will kill ordinary people over their terrible secrets. Jigsaw goes after the adulterer, the stalker, the druggie (social attitude towards drugs in the 00's feels like they were pretty similar to the 80's), and the people who 'waste' their lives. These deadly games are meant to make it's victims find redemption.

We could write books on the politics of the morality on display. There's something of it's decade here: punish the druggie, punish people living on the fringes of society. Suicide represented as cries for attention rather than as mental illness. On the other hand, we see cops breaking the law over incorrect hunches, the horrors of the beginning of constant surveillance, the inhumanity of the medical system. Perhaps its not enough to truly call it a period piece, but it is certainly of its time. We can see the seeds of social issues that would continue to grow to today. 

To say something negative about Saw, the film is too dynamic and edited quickly like an action film in its fast-paced scenes. The effects show the constraints of their budget, and clash with slower building horror. It creates a distinction, but the editing goes a little to far.

So, here is our first film in Splatterfest 2026. Horror now learning its language, leaving behind the meta horror of Scream. This was the breakout of splatter (in the 00's known as gore porn or 'gorn') into the mainstream. Saw was the first rider over the hill, and we would see that Hell followed with it.