Despite the reputation it earned as shock-factor torture porn thanks to the increasingly reductive format of the sequels, Saw is essentially a horror-grown thriller with hints of outright violence and shockingly little gore. James Wan and Leigh Whannell's nasty little puzzle box introduced one of the most iconic modern horror villains in Tobin Bell's Jigsaw, a murderer of ideals and dastardly creativity. Setting his sights on victim's who take their life for granted, Jigsaw constructs a series of puzzles and challenges designed to test the victim's grit and will to live. Jigsaw's essential credo is that if one doesn't value life enough to do whatever it takes to survive, then they are undeserving of it. The film's main action is set against two unlikely allies, chained together in a room with scant clues on how to escape. Jigsaw gives each of them pieces of the puzzle, turning them against each other despite their bet efforts to collaborate on an escape strategy. It's a chamber piece meets noir detective thriller that, along with Eli Roth's Hostel, became the progenitor of the torture porn craze. But while Jigsaw's grisly traps became the calling card of the franchise, Wan and Whannell were up to something much more clever and Saw is no parade of graphic perversion, but a twisty murder mystery that values narrative surprise over shock value set-pieces.
