The first Saw film was not really a Saw film
Franchises become what audiences remember about them
A few years ago, I watched all the mainline Saw films (up to 2010’s dreadful Saw: The Final Chapter) with my girlfriend at the time. The first film is legendary, mostly for its devastating final twist, and I was convinced to watch it by its reputation alone.
What shocked me was how little Saw resembles the “torture porn” image the franchise would acquire through its parade of annual sequels. It is a claustrophobic little thriller driven by a central mystery: who put our protagonists in this filthy bathroom, and why? Yes, the film introduced the world to the iconic reverse bear trap, but it is mostly devoid of gore, or even blood. Much of the violence occurs offscreen. While the film is visibly a product of the early 2000s (with its bursts of frenetic editing, grimy music-video aesthetic, and a flashback-within-a-flashback), it really is an excellent movie.
But this is not how anyone remembers Saw. The series is now synonymous with elaborate traps, industrial gore, and tiresome explanations from Jigsaw about how he has technically never murdered anyone. After the first film, the series’s brains started to slide out onto the bathroom floor, leaving behind a brutal sequence of traps and an increasingly convoluted plot. Once the writers ran out of ideas following Saw III, the series leaned harder and harder on its most recognizable excesses.
I guess this is the fate of a lot of franchises.
The first Rambo film, First Blood, was about a traumatized Vietnam veteran being persecuted by small-town police. But the series devolved into what the public now remembers: Sylvester Stallone firing a machine gun with his shirt off. Rambo became a byword for a reckless, violent man.
Death Wish (the original with the inimitable Charles Bronson) could plausibly be read as a bleak film about grief curdling into violence, as well as a dread-soaked expression of urban fear in the 1970s. The sequels dispensed with the ambiguity and nakedly sought cheers from the baying mob.
A franchise eventually stops resembling its first installment and starts resembling the bits people remember from its teaser trailer.