The Depressed Industrial Body Horror of ‘Saw’

Of all the ways to die, “death by Facebook” seems among the worst, although truthfully the most horrific aspect of 2014’s Unfriended is the prospect that, even after death, one would have to continue using social media.

The project of classical Cronenbergian body horror has long been one of the post-human, a progression. Max Renn transcends the human body in Videodrome. Pleasure goes beyond the flesh in Hellraiser. Seth Brundle becomes a new species entirely in The Fly. And while much of post-Cronenbergian body horror has continued that project, often in a larger social context, the Saw films are an entirely different strain of modern body horror. Saw represents an industrialization of the human body, a transformation, but into something less than human, a regression.

Metallic and mechanical body horror has a strong tradition, most notably Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and in a broader sense much of body horror is an odyssey of technological augmentation. That said, the machines of Saw are different. In Saw, the body becomes the machinery of its own demise, not liberation, weighing down bodies with the past rather than the future.

The Saw franchise begins with with two men chained up in a small room, but it only grows from there. The central premise is that a serial killer dubbed “Jigsaw” by the media traps his victims in elaborate traps, heavy machinery of death from which they theoretically have an opportunity to escape, provided they are willing to suffer pain and injury and/or submit others to same. Jigsaw does this in service of a grand (and as the series wears on, increasingly convoluted) vision of justice and appreciation for the gift of life. Jigsaw famously gives his victims the chance to allegedly choose their fate: “live or die; make your choice”. Even so, Jigsaw’s machinations are ones few survive. It’s a horror franchise, after all, so a body count is obligatory.

Jigsaw’s traps transform the body, suturing it to machine and entwining one’s fate with the mechanical operation of the equipment devised by the killer. By the attaching the victim to these machines, Jigsaw dooms the body to breakdown accelerated by rusty, repurposed hardware. In Saw, the body is a piece of equipment that is ticking down, in literal clockwork fashion, to death.

The 2018 film Upgrade envisioned a human body displaced by a supercomputer, the flesh a mere tool of the workings of a hyperintelligent AI. In this way, Upgrade is the inverse of Saw: where Upgrade looks forward at the nightmare of a human-technology hybrid — in many ways a commentary on a world shaped by algorithm and engagement with computer screens — the horrors of saw have been brewing since the industrial revolution.

The games played in Saw are a precipitated downfall, sparked by the hollowing out of the U.S. industrial centers. It’s no coincidence that so much of Saw takes place in abandoned buildings: facilities emptied of their former usefulness, now repurposed to become sites of a more immediate demise. Jigsaw ties his victims’ fates to that of the industrial era itself.

Jigsaw himself, an engineer named John Kramer, dies in the finale of Saw III, but thanks to accomplices, video recordings, and flashbacks, Jigsaw’s project continues throughout the franchise. It is Jigsaw, not his victims, who reaches a particular kind of post-human existence reminiscent of the archive of tapes that comprise the brain of Dr. Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome.

There are eight films in the Saw franchise: seven central films released yearly beginning in 2004, Saw I – VII, plus an addendum of sorts, 2017’s Jigsaw, and lastly the tangentially related Spiral, subtitled From the Book of Saw (not a Saw film, but one that takes place in the same universe). The lattermost film takes its name from the subtle visual motif employed throughout the Saw franchise, but it also borrows from Junji Ito’s body horror manga Uzumaki (translated: Spiral).

As in Uzumaki, bodies in Saw films contort and distort according to a particular design, in the case of Saw that of John Kramer. But the spiral is also meaningful in representing the structure of the series as a whole, as the narrative spirals inward rather than expanding outward. Each Saw sequel, at least up to the last proper entry, peers further into Jigsaw’s abyss.

The message of the Saw franchise, regardless of Kramer’s actual intent, is one weighted down by a history of technology that is now aging, breaking down, and phasing out. A great deal of horror looks to the future, like Unfriended, a film about a haunted Skype hangout session that suggests the uncanniness and toxicity inherent in over-saturated social media networks, soft technology that has supplanted the hard machinery that is John Kramer’s bread and butter.

Thus, the ethereal quality to modern techno-horror like Unfriended (which is presented as a film-long view of the protagonist’s computer screen) versus the more weighty, physical quality of the Saw franchise. As technology evolves, and machinery dies, someone is around breathing new life (or death) into it.