By Tyler Davidson
By Tyler Davidson
If there is anything that the film industry has shown us in the past several years, it is that the concept of torture is most definitely in style.
Kicked off during the Halloween season of 2004, the Saw franchise started with a bang. A sadist that appeared to be preaching to his victims, the man known as Jigsaw technically was not a killer. He instead opted to devise the grisliest of traps in order to test the question he posed to those he came in contact with: “How much blood would you shed to stay alive?”
Saw chilled audiences to the bone and was as psychologically terrifying as any horror film that had come before it. It forced audiences to not only watch people die, but to watch them undergo torture; to watch them suffer. This paved the way for other torture based films, like Eli Roth’s Hostel.
In 2005, Darren Lynn Bousman’s Saw 2 was released, along with a revelation. Jigsaw, a terminal cancer patient, wished to preserve his legacy, and thus, chose a protege. This “student” turned out to be Amanda, one of the prisoners in the house as well as the only one to have survived a previous Jigsaw “game.”
Much gorier than its predecessor, Saw 2 still delivered the same shock value that the first did. It continued to make audiences squirm by forcing them to watch suffering.
This Halloween, the third film in the series will be released. A bedridden Jigsaw, now further along in his deathward spiral, sends Amanda to kidnap Dr. Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh), who is then told that she must keep Jigsaw alive long enough for another victim (Jeff, played by Angus Macfayden) to complete his own game.
Saw 3 promises to be the goriest of the Saw trilogy. The film apparently had to be sent to the MPAA ratings board on a total of seven different occasions before finally receiving the long-awaited “R” rating; each attempt up till that point was met with an answer of “NC-17,” which was also the original rating for Saw.
Saw and Saw 2 are frightening, yet highly enjoyable, pieces of cinema that will shock any moviegoer.
Saw 3 looks to deal out more of the same to audiences, allowing them to look on in fear as normal people are put through the most painful and agonizing of ordeals. Its frightening subject matter is foreshadowed by Jigsaw’s morbid claim in the trailer: “Suffering? You haven’t seen anything yet.”