Warning: Some bloody images.

Saw (2003) dir. James Wan

Short personal story here: I was at the premiere screening of the feature version of Saw at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2004, a time when the general public did not know what Saw was, let alone a Saw II-X or Spiral or anything else from the Book of Saw. It was programmed as a midnight show with much buzz about its intensity, so I didn’t go in completely blind, and yet there was a palpable sensation that we were seeing an unusual amount of unfettered sick imagination (the theater cranking the sound to 11 hurt my ears but not the sensation of being tortured). A giddy teenager was brought up on stage afterward and it took me a long while to realize this chipper lad was 26-year-old James Wan, the man responsible for the gruesome film we had just witnessed.

Gore was nothing new to horror, of course, but at that moment in time extreme gore existed a little to the side of the mainstream. Rob Zombie was just getting his thing going with House of 1000 Corpses, but money-making American horror was still in the spooky PG-13 wake of The Sixth Sense and The Ring. The big horror titles released in 2003, the year of this short and the year before the feature’s October release, included Final Destination 2 and Freddy vs. Jason, with bloody kills in anticipatable scenes, quick as lopped limbs. We were still a couple years from Hostel and the  official “torture porn” era when seeing an extended sequence of a man chained to a chair with a decapitating device strapped to his face wouldn’t seem so unusual. And that’s that contribution of Saw and its ilk, adding that confinement element to horror. Rather than a nightmare where you can’t outrun the monster, it’s the one where you can’t move, helpless against the terrible thing against your skin.

As for the short, it sells the energy Wan and collaborator Leigh Wannell (who also plays the lead) would bring to the feature. Curiously it includes the paper-thin lesson of the later film (enjoy life lest a puppet kills you with a reverse bear trap), but not Jigsaw, the villain who espouses this less throughout the franchise. Also it has a buzzkill of a wraparound – looks like the guy’s going to make it out with his mouth able to close – but not the feature’s famous opening and closing setpiece with two men chained up and discovering the reason the film is called Saw (is the “Saw” title of the short actually a past-tense verb?)

The short does, however, give the puppet an adorable hat, a detail that I really wish had survived.