Editorials
The Top 10 Most Disturbing Traps from the Saw Franchise — Ranked
Saw is an iconic horror franchise that’s always worth a watch. It’s a crime thriller coupled with serial killers who commit gruesome murders to prove a twisted point about their morality. The victims wake up, finding themselves trapped and given a choice to torture themselves and survive or be killed brutally by some disturbing mechanism.
These morbid situations, or traps, are the Saw franchise’s most compelling and memorable element. If you don’t have the time (or the stomach) to sit down and binge all nine films to watch the victims struggle to escape each specific and creative set of confines, this article is for you.
Here are the top ten most disturbing traps from the Saw franchise, ranked from nightmarish to “every time I close my eyes, I see the horrors of that trap beneath my eyelids”- level terrifying.
The 10 most disturbing traps from the Saw franchise
10: Reverse Bear Trap (Multiple Appearances)
Arguably the most iconic trap from the franchise, the Reverse Bear Trap appears multiple times throughout the movies.
In Saw (2004), its victim is Amanda Young. She wakes up with a metal device secured to her head and soon learns that if she fails to take it off before the timer goes off, the machine will snap backward like a reverse bear trap, ripping Amanda’s face apart. She can only remove it by slicing into her cellmate’s stomach and removing the key from inside him while he’s still alive.
Amanda escapes just in time. She flings the device off one moment before it snaps open.
The reverse bear trap makes a few more appearances later in the franchise and only takes one victim’s life. This horrifying contraption deserves a spot on this list because of its infamy and the horrific concept of what it can do to the human body. It’s only number ten on the list because many people manage to pass this game.
9: Furnace Trap (Saw II)
The Majority of Saw II (2005) takes place in the Nerve Gas House, a large-scale trap with multiple people stuck inside. They each must face specific individual traps within the house to access the antidote to the nerve gas, which Jigsaw’s puppet tells the participants will kill them within two hours. If they manage to pass their games and get the antidote, a door will open shortly after the two-hour mark.
One of these individual games is the furnace trap. Obi Tate is the victim. There’s a furnace in the basement of the house, which contains two vials of the antidote. Obi hops inside and grabs them, which activates the door and causes it to close, shutting Obi inside and starting a fire. Obi can only survive by reaching through the flames to turn a valve and shut off the fire. He fails and perishes by burning alive.
8: Pig Vat Trap (Saw III)
This one is on the list because it’s unique, creative, and incredibly disgusting. It’s one of the many trials on Jeff Danlon’s larger quest to pass through the meatpacking plant rigged by Jigsaw and confront Timothy Young, the man who killed his young son.
The victim of the pig vat trap is Judge Halden, the man who presided over the court ruling that Timothy only serve a mere six months in prison. Jeff finds the Judge strapped to the bottom of a large vat, held down by his neck. When the tape plays, Jigsaw’s puppet instructs Jeff that to save the Judge and move into the next room to get closer to confronting Timothy, he must burn up all of his deceased son’s remaining belongings to find the key in the ashes.
As Jeff struggles with this choice, motors begin to whir, and decaying pig carcasses from within the plant begin to shutter forward, held up by large wires. They’re dropped into a meat blender, coming out the other end through a chute as a disgusting thick, greenish sludge that floods over the Judge’s body.
By the time Jeff retrieves the key, the Judge is almost entirely submerged by the wretched substance, with only his mouth peeking through the surface.
7: Classroom Trap (Saw III)
If your greatest fear is getting a fish hook stuck in your skin, this trap will haunt your nightmares.
The victim of the classroom trap was a drug addict named Troy, who struggled to stay out of prison due to his addiction. Jigsaw targeted him for just that reason. He instructed his apprentice Amanda to abduct Troy and bring him to a classroom, where she removes his clothes and stabs eleven large hooks through different body parts. Each hook is connected to a chain that keeps Troy in place. Before leaving, Amanda places a bomb near Troy and welds the door shut to prevent Troy from escaping.
When Troy awakes, he learns he must rip each hook out of his flesh before the timer goes off to escape the room and avoid dying in the bomb’s explosion. He gets all but one hook out before the bomb kills him. Even if he had escaped the hooks, he would have been trapped in the room because Amanda gave him no chance of escape.
6: Needle Pit (Saw II)
The needle pit is a simple yet horrific trap within the Nerve Gas House. Jigsaw set up the trap specifically for a drug dealer named Xavier. The group in the house comes across a room with a locked door and soon discovers that there is a vial of the antidote behind it.
The only way to unlock the door and get inside is with a key hidden within a pit in the floor. The problem is that the pit is also filled with thousands of used needles. Xavier refuses to take the test himself and instead throws Amanda in to retrieve the key.
It’s impossible not to wince as you watch Amanda sift through the needles, stabbing her flesh as she goes, while Xavier shouts at her to hurry from above.
5: Silence Circle (Saw 3D)
This trap was designed for Bobby Dagan, a man who pretended to survive Jigsaw’s tests and wrote a best-selling book about his journey, but was a fraud. Jigsaw took revenge by tossing him into a trap of his own.
The second trap within Bobby’s larger game was the silence circle. Bobby walks into a room and finds his publicist, Nina, confined in a straitjacket and some form of head restraint. Surrounding her head are sharp metal rods, with the pointy ends directly facing in towards Nina.
The two learn that Bobby must retrieve a key from Nina’s stomach to free her. It’s attached to a string he must pull, causing the key to rise through her stomach and tear through her esophagus. If he doesn’t free her from the trap in time, the metal rods will pierce through her neck and kill her.
On top of that, every time the decibel level goes above a whisper, the metal rods move even more quickly towards Nina’s throat to punish her for spreading Bobby’s lies to make a profit.
4: Pendulum Trap (Saw V)
This one is ruthless, considering that the victim had no hope of escaping this one at all.
Mark Hoffman, Jigsaw’s apprentice, decided to torture and kill Seth, the man who murdered his sister. Seth was originally sentenced to life in prison but got out after five years. That’s when Mark decided to take justice into his own hands in the most twisted way possible.
Seth woke up to find he was lying down shirtless, strapped to a table. A tape began to play and informed him that to escape death, he must crush his hands in a metal contraption. He’s promised that he will be freed once his hands are destroyed. If he doesn’t crush his own hands fast enough, he’ll die a brutal death. A colossal blade begins to swing back and forth like a pendulum over the center of Seth’s body, shifting lower and lower until it slices him in half.
Even though Seth completes his task and crushes his hands into a bloody, mangled mess, he is never released from the bindings. He slowly dies as the swinging blades descend on his stomach, slicing him deeper and deeper, scattering his organs across the room.
3: Razor Wire Maze (Saw)
The most straightforward traps are often the most diabolical. The victim of the razor wire maze is Paul Leahy, a man who attempted to die by suicide a month before Jigsaw abducted him. That’s exactly why Jigsaw targeted him for this trap, making it even more shiver-inducing.
Paul woke up inside a fence within a basement. At one end sits Paul, mostly naked and terrified. At the other end, Paul saw an open door. However, between him and the door to freedom lies a maze of razor wire. Paul soon learns he must make it to the door within two hours, or he’ll be locked in the basement and left to die. His only chance of survival is through the razor wire maze.
Police find Paul’s body trapped within the wire weeks later. He clearly attempted to get free but never made it to the door. Can you imagine what he must have felt as he forced his body through the sharp wires, slicing him raw, and the door swung shut with a dull thud?
2: Angel Wing Trap (Saw III)
I’ll never unsee this one, no matter how hard I try.
Detective Allison Kerry is the victim of the dreaded angel wing trap. When she wakes, she’s dangling from the ceiling, confined by a metal device attached to her rib cage. There’s a key sitting in a tub of acid directly in front of her face. The tape starts and Jigsaw’s puppet informs Kerry that to live, she must reach into the vat of acid and retrieve the key to unlock herself. If she fails to fish it out before the timer runs out or the key dissolves into nothingness, the contraption on her ribcage will open up like a set of angel wings and rip her apart.
Kerry is determined to get that key. After burning her hand and turning the clear acid red with blood, she grabs the key and unlocks herself before the timer goes off. But there’s a problem. Kerry discovers another lock holding the device in place, and her chance of survival is a hoax.
Amanda walks into the room just before the angel wings open up, spilling Kerry’s organs all over the floor.
1: Venus Fly Trap (Saw II)
The Death Mask, or the Venus fly trap, is the last trip I’d ever want to find myself in, and here’s why.
The victim, Michael Marks, realizes he’s no longer at home in bed. Instead, he’s stuck in a room with a strange device secured to his neck, and his eye is injured. To his horror, he plays the tape and realizes that the device around his neck will eventually close with a snap like a venus fly trap, sending sharp spikes through his head to kill him.
Michael’s only hope of freeing himself from this gruesome torture device is to unlock it with a key. However, he learns that Jigsaw surgically placed the key inside Michael’s eye, and the only way to get to the key is to cut his own eye open with a scalpel.
While other traps in the Saw franchise have disturbing eye-gore, this one takes the cake as the most horrifying by far. Michael is forced to physically extract something from his eye after cutting it open with a scalpel. Something so disgustingly intimate about that act makes me want to cover my eyes forever.
He only has one minute to complete this gruesome task, and he fails. I can’t imagine trying to make it through this one.
…
Now your brain is chock full of disturbing images of death and murder. You’re welcome! Did I miss any of your favorite traps in this list?
I was late to the Radio Silence party. However, I do not let that stop me from being one of the loudest people at the function now. I randomly decided to see Ready or Not in theaters one afternoon in 2019 and walked out a better person for it. The movie introduced me to the work of a team that would become some of my favorite current filmmakers. It also confirmed that getting married is the worst thing one can do. That felt very validating as someone who doesn’t buy into the needing to be married to be complete narrative.
Ready or Not is about a fucked up family with a fucked up tradition. The unassuming Grace (Samara Weaving) thinks her new in-laws are a bit weird. However, she’s blinded by love on her wedding day. She would never suspect that her groom, Alex (Mark O’Brien), would lead her into a deadly wedding night. So, she heads downstairs to play a game with the family, not knowing that they will be hunting her this evening. This is one of the many ways I am different from Grace. I watch enough of the news to know the husband should be the prime suspect, and I have been around long enough to know men are the worst. I also have a commitment phobia, so the idea of walking down the aisle gives me anxiety.
Grace Under Fire
Ready or Not is a horror comedy set on a wealthy family’s estate that got overshadowed by Knives Out. I have gone on record multiple times saying it’s the better movie. Sadly, because it has fewer actors who are household names, people are not ready to have that conversation. However, I’m taking up space this month to talk about catharsis, so let me get back on track. One of the many ways this movie is better than the latter is because of that sweet catharsis awaiting us at the end.
This movie puts Grace through it and then some. Weaving easily makes her one of the easiest final girls to root for over a decade too. From finding out the man she loves has betrayed her, to having to fight off the in-laws trying to kill her, as she is suddenly forced to fight to survive her wedding night. No one can say that Grace doesn’t earn that cigarette at the end of the film. As she sits on the stairs covered in the blood of what was supposed to be her new family, she is a relatable icon. As the unseen cop asks what happened to her, she simply says, “In-laws.” It’s a quick laugh before the credits roll, and “Love Me Tender” by Stereo Jane makes us dance and giggle in our seats.
Ready or Not Proves That Maybe She’s Better Off Alone
It is also a moment in which Grace is one of many women who survives marriage. She comes out of the other side beaten but not broken. Grace finally put herself, and her needs first, and can breathe again in a way she hasn’t since saying I do. She fought kids, her parents-in-law, and even her husband to escape with her life. She refused to be a victim, and with that cigarette, she is finally free and safe. Grace is back to being single, and that’s clearly for the best.
This Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy script is funny on the surface, even before you start digging into the subtext. The fact that Ready or Not is a movie where the happy ending is a woman being left alone is not wasted on me, though. While Grace thought being married would make her happy, she now has physical and emotional wounds to remind her that it’s okay to be alone.
One of the things I love about this current era of Radio Silence films is that the women in these projects are not the perfect victims. Whether it’s Ready or Not, Abigail, or Scream (2022), or Scream VI, the girls are fighting. They want to live, they are smart and resourceful, and they know that no one is coming to help them. That’s why I get excited whenever I see Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s names appear next to a Guy Busick co-written script. Those three have cracked the code to give us women protagonists that are badasses, and often more dangerous than their would-be killers when push comes to shove.
Ready or Not Proves That Commitment is Scarier Than Death
So, watching Grace run around this creepy family’s estate in her wedding dress is a vision. It’s also very much the opposite of what we expect when we see a bride. Wedding days are supposed to be champagne, friends, family, and trying to buy into the societal notion that being married is what we’re supposed to aspire to as AFABs. They start programming us pretty early that we have to learn to cook to feed future husbands and children.
The traditions of being given away by our fathers, and taking our husbands’ last name, are outdated patriarchal nonsense. Let’s not even get started on how some guys still ask for a woman’s father’s permission to propose. These practices tell us that we are not real people so much as pawns men pass off to each other. These are things that cause me to hyperventilate a little when people try to talk to me about settling down.
Marriage Ain’t For Everybody
I have a lot of beef with marriage propaganda. That’s why Ready or Not speaks to me on a bunch of levels that I find surprising and fresh. Most movies would have forced Grace and Alex to make up at the end to continue selling the idea that heterosexual romance is always the answer. Even in horror, the concept that “love will save the day” is shoved at us (glares at The Conjuring Universe). So, it’s cool to see a movie that understands women can be enough on their own. We don’t need a man to complete us, and most of the time, men do lead to more problems. While I am no longer a part-time smoker, I find myself inhaling and exhaling as Grace takes that puff at the end of the film. As a woman who loves being alone, it’s awesome to be seen this way.
The Cigarette of Singledom
We don’t need movies to validate our life choices. However, it’s nice to be acknowledged every so often. If for no other reason than to break up the routine. I’m so tired of seeing movies that feel like a guy and a girl making it work, no matter the odds, is admirable. Sometimes people are better when they separate, and sometimes divorce saves lives. So, I salute Grace and her cathartic cigarette at the end of her bloody ordeal.
I cannot wait to see what single shenanigans she gets into in Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. I personally hope she inherited that money from the dead in-laws who tried her. She deserves to live her best single girl life on a beach somewhere. Grace’s marriage was a short one, but she learned a lot. She survived it, came out the other side stronger, richer, and knowing that marriage isn’t for everybody.
I’ve come to the kind of grim conclusion that sooner or later we’re all going to succumb to horror franchise fatigue. Bear with me, this editorial is more stream of consciousness than most of the ones I’ve written for Horror Press. For those unaware, the forthcoming Camp Crystal Lake show spent a short period of time shooting at a beloved local North Jersey restaurant near me in August. This meant progress for the A24 project that has been radio silent for a while; it also meant no rippers while it was closed for filming, but who said Jason’s reign of terror would be without consequence?
When Horror Franchise Fatigue Becomes An Issue
My friends mentioned it on an idle afternoon, and I carried that conversation over to another friend later that week. It inevitably turned into what all conversations of long-lived franchises do. Talking about how far the series had come, how influential it was, and how it died. Or at least, died without a death certificate. Nothing will keep a studio from coming back to a franchise if that’s where the money is, barring legal troubles and copyright shenanigans.
Revisiting Friday the 13th: A Franchise Rewatch Gone Wrong
As I fondly thought about the Friday series, I was spurred to watch the films. I would watch it all, from start to finish, all twelve movies. Not for any particular article, though the planned process was similar. They’re fascinating films that were both helped and harmed by their immense financial success, so they were as good as any franchise to analyze the changes in. I would note the difference between directors, the shift in tone. How cultural consciousness changed the films as they went on. I would dissect them to see what was at the heart of these movies.
I got about 15 minutes into Part 4 before stopping my marathon.
Horror Franchise Fatigue and the Loss of Enjoyment
Now, this might sound strange. I liked The Final Chapter, I like pretty much all the Friday films (especially the worst ones). And I know that I enjoy them, not from some abstract nostalgia driven memories, but because I had seen several of them recently enough to know that. What it came down to was a very simple question of whether or not I was having fun watching them. The enjoyment was the point, but by the fifth day, I wasn’t feeling anything. I wanted to love the Friday the 13th films the same way I did when I previously watched them, but it just didn’t happen.
And I was confused, how a franchise I had enjoyed so much had just become so unmoving. It wasn’t the experience I had had before. But the truth was that experience couldn’t be restored, and that desire to bring it back was actively harming my enjoyment of the films.
Why Standalone Horror Experiences Still Matter
In contrast, I showed my favorite giallo film to some friends recently. Dario Argento’s Opera is a film I’ve seen plenty of times, and it was a big hit thanks to its Grand Guignol sensibilities and one-of-a-kind cinematography. As far as tales about an opera singer being forced to witness murders go, it got a warm reception. It was crass, it was odd, it was provocative.
And watching my friends’ reactions, from intrigue to disgust to enjoyment, was the exact kind of experience I was hoping for. It was a memorable experience that stuck with me as much as seeing the film for the first time did.
We Don’t Love Horror Franchises, We Love the Experience
It may sound ignorant, but largely, I feel we don’t love franchises. We love the experience. We love the feeling of seeing something come together over the course of hours, the novelty of characters growing and changing if it’s allowed by the scripts. The special emotion invoked when you spend so much time with a piece of media; it’s the same emotion that gets you hooked on a good TV show.
Now for some of you, this is splitting hairs. But I think the core of this is important to recognize: the franchise is just a vessel for the experiences the media provides. It’s shorthand for what you’ve felt and how you feel, a signifier rather than what’s really being signified. The Friday, and Nightmare, and Halloween “series”, as concepts are abstract enough to mean a million different things to a million different viewers, but at the end of the day they are all a collection of viewing experiences to someone.
Fan Culture, Shared Horror Memories, and Closure
Those experiences are the core of “fan culture”. We love how our experiences link with those of others, registering flashes of recognition at a turn of phrase or a reference to a scene. That nebulous tangling of thoughts and feelings with other people is at the essence of shared enjoyment. And if you’re lucky enough, we love to see the book close on a franchise. To see a film series end, having completed its journey is a reward of its own.
But unfortunately, we often don’t get the privilege of watching a series end gracefully or even end at all. The Halloween series and The Exorcist series with their latest entries are obvious examples, and they’ve put the two franchises at arm’s length for me. But they’re far from the only ones.
Scream, Legacy Characters, and the Cost of Overextension
I especially don’t think I can return to the Scream films for a good long while. Putting aside the absolute trash fire made by Spyglass Entertainment firing its lead, then rushing a 7th film so badly they lost the Radio Silence team, I had already tapped out the minute I had heard the film’s premise. If there ever was a horror protagonist who should have stayed retired, it was Sidney Prescott.
All respect to Neve Campbell for finally getting her paycheck, but I can’t think of something less appealing than Sidney coming back. I’ve always been a Scream 3 purist, so I firmly believe that she shouldn’t have been in any of the films after that. She had gotten her happy ending, and left horror as one of the greatest of all time.
But then dangling a legacy character of that significance over a shallow inflatable pool for a third time, and treating it as shark infested waters, just feels ridiculous. The trailer that dropped for it did very little to assuage the notion that it would be anything but predictable.
This isn’t to say I’ve written off Scream entirely, but familiarity in this case has bred some level of contempt. I can identify pretty clearly what I loved about the experience that the Scream franchise used to offer, and this is not it. It’s made me more or less sulky about what it has to offer now; that is, very little of the novelty and shock factor I loved it for.
Why It’s Okay to Walk Away From Horror Franchises You Love
All of these thoughts and encounters led to a series of questions I kept revolving through. Why do we play a game of loyalty to something so abstract as “the franchise”? Is the collection of experiences we attach to a series supposed to be an emotional wage we’re paid to stick around? Is that payment enough? Why should we keep watching a series if we’ve fallen out of love with what it has to offer?
I know as much as you do that the answer to that last question is “we shouldn’t”, and yet we still do. For those of us who have fallen into a similar pessimistic state about the franchises we enjoy, I guess this is all just a way of stating the obvious: it’s okay to leave a series behind. If it’s not fun or engaging or challenging, you can and should set it aside, at least temporarily. While I’m not a proponent of killing fond memories or condemning all nostalgia, that’s just the problem: I want to feel something more than I want to remember that feeling.
Choosing New Horror Over Nostalgia
The old experience of media we once loved can be nice, but there are more new experiences out there than we can have in a single lifetime. We have a near infinite amount to choose from. So, if we’re fortunate, one of them belongs to a series we love, and we can enjoy it once more. But for those of us who don’t have that luck, consider this a reminder that there is a lot more than these familiar faces to see. Next time you feel down about a series you miss or find yourself unable to continue watching, reach for something new. Something odd. Something you haven’t seen. It might just help.
Happy watching, horror fans.
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