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.
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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?
The United States spent most of this year celebrating its 250th anniversary. There have been parades, fireworks, and endless reminders of what the nation wants us to think are its founding ideals. Yet anniversaries are as much about what we choose to remember as they are about what we choose to forget. There is another anniversary this year. Five years ago this month, Candyman was released. The fact that both that film and America are sharing an anniversary this year may have been an accident, but that makes it no less significant.
Released amid another national reckoning over race, Nia DaCosta’s film asks a question that every celebration of America ought to confront: Is it possible to commemorate this nation without fully reckoning with the violence woven into its history? More than a sequel to a horror classic, Candyman is a meditation on the ghosts that haunt America because it has never fully reckoned with the past that created them.
How the Original Candyman Confronted America’s Racial History
The original Candyman understood this. Released in 1992 and set in the almost post-apocalyptic urban decay that was Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Bernard Rose’s film arrived only months after the L.A. Race Riots, a moment when this country was coming to terms with the way the country’s relationship with Black folks was shaped by decades of segregation and racism.
Most audiences saw a supernatural slasher about a hook-handed killer summoned by saying his name five times into a mirror. But beneath the horror was a far more unsettling story. Candyman was about the lingering consequences of America’s racial history and the way white America has sometimes turned Black suffering into myth instead of confronting the systems that produced it.
The film’s true horror was never simply Candyman. It was the realization that monsters can be born from histories a nation refuses to face. That is exactly where the 2021 film expands the original’s vision.
Nia DaCosta’s Candyman Turns One Ghost Into Many
Bernard Rose’s Candyman explored the legacy of a single act of racist terror. Nia DaCosta’s film argues that the tragedy wasn’t confined to Daniel Robitaille, the man who became the monster. The 2021 film posits that Candyman is not one man but many.
Daniel Robitaille was lynched for loving a white woman. Sherman Fields takes on the mantle of the supernatural slasher because he was beaten to death by police after being falsely accused of harming a child. Anthony McCoy ultimately becomes part of the same legend. Their stories span generations, but they are connected by a nation that repeatedly produces the same injustice under different names at different points in history. The genius of the sequel is that it transforms Candyman from an individual ghost into a symbol of America’s recurring racial violence.
Candyman Shows How History Repeats Itself
History, the film suggests, is not something that happened once. It is something that keeps happening. That is why Candyman is one of my favorite films to teach in my Film and Philosophy course.
Students walk into class expecting a horror movie. They leave wrestling with questions about history, memory, and justice. We spend little time talking about jump scares or gore. (Because, let’s be honest, there is not much of that in the film.) Instead, we ask why some histories become legends while others are forgotten, what societies owe their victims, and whether a nation can ever move forward without honestly confronting the violence that shaped it.
The Horror of Remembering What America Wants to Forget
A good horror film reveals what we fear. What makes Candyman great is how it reveals what we would rather not remember. That is what haunted me the first time I saw it, long after the credits had rolled.
Five years after its release, Candyman remains one of the most unsettling movies in recent years because the history it confronts is not safely behind us. The original film understood that America’s racial violence could not simply be buried, while the 2021 film showed how easily that violence can be reproduced across generations.
Its Unquestionable Legacy in Horror
As America celebrates 250 years, Candyman reminds us that commemorating the nation’s founding requires remembering all this country’s history, including the parts that make the celebration uncomfortable.
We cannot exorcise a ghost by refusing to acknowledge why it exists. Perhaps that is the film’s most important lesson. The past does not haunt us because we remember it. It haunts us because we don’t.
Sometimes it feels borderline ridiculous to gush about John Carpenter’s The Thing as much as I do. It’s gotten to the point where when I’m asked about my favorite horror film by both friends and strangers, a little bit of embarrassment tinges my expression as I answer; it feels so obvious and rarely surprises anyone. Saying I love The Thing when people expect me to bust out an obscure foreign horror film or a cerebral thriller makes me feel like a rosy cheeked child with a propeller hat and a giant lollipop. “Wow, you love one of the most popular horror films of all time, congrats!”
But it’s just the truth. The first film of John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy”, all three of its films are among my favorites. But The Thing has a special place in my heart. It shaped my taste in horror, my taste in most media in general, to be honest. It’s become the gold standard, 10/10 baseline test for the vast majority of my reviews; it is a perfect film, so I judge other films against it. And it’s one of the few movies I have to run back to and watch yearly like clockwork (usually when I’m spending a part of winter tied to the couch). It is, in all regards, the perfect film. If it isn’t the perfect film, then it is at the very least the perfect sci-fi horror film.
So, what exactly qualifies The Thing for literal perfection? It’s a high bar to clear. This article, as informal as it is compared to most of my editorials, is an attempt to explain it.
Even if Carpenter Isn’t the Goat, His Team for The Thing Was
As far as crews go, John Carpenter’s The Thing had the cinematic equivalent of the ’96 Chicago Bulls behind it. We’re talking about an amalgam of some of the most talented people to ever grace the silver screens with their work, boasting alongside John Carpenter two of the heaviest hitters in all of cinematic history: Dean Cundey, and Rob Bottin. Now, we can debate all day about whether John Carpenter is the greatest of all time when it comes to horror directors. Personally, I’m just as liable to say Cronenberg, Del Toro, or Hooper as I am to say Carpenter.
But the key factor to remember here is that Carpenter is the coach, not the star player; the Phil Jackson, if you will. Yes, he is the visionary who directed a near perfect cast of players and composed a tale of pure, apocalyptic paranoia. More importantly, he put together and coordinated the team that would make his vision manifest as reality. And if Carpenter is Phil Jackson, Rob Bottin is the team’s Michael Jordan here, the greatest of all time.
(And to all my Lebron fans, I love you, but you have to sit down for this analogy.)
The Legend of Rob Bottin
Bottin’s story is borderline unbelievable, but it’s the best way to explain how abnormally skilled he is and what he brought to the table for Carpenter. At age 14, Bottin became an apprentice to the at-the-time GOAT Rick Baker after sending him a letter seeking an autograph while sharing his creature designs. He was a quick study under Baker, joining him on the ’76 King Kong and Star Wars, before bouncing to Carpenter’s The Fog and then iconic werewolf picture The Howling.
When he reunited with Carpenter in 1982, he now had 6 classic films under his belt and was moving like an FX bullet train. From ages 22 to 23, he worked on The Thing for 57 weeks in both pre-production and on set. Nearly 24/7 for 400 days, Bottin’s all-gas no-brakes work ethic made The Thing at the cost of his own health, and it resulted in him being hospitalized with pneumonia. He survived and went on to make Robocop. And at least one of your favorite films.
Because no conventional disease or weaponry can kill Rob Bottin.
The Thing Still Features Horror’s Best Practical Effects
Okay, that last bit might be hyperbolic, but the man sincerely put his life on the line to make special effects that haven’t been topped since. Not the best effects in just horror history, or science fiction history, but effects that haven’t been topped in any genre for over 44 years. Not by his mentor Rick Baker, not by Screaming Mad George, not by Alec Gillis (though shoutout to him for his criminally scrapped work on The Thing (2011), and even more criminally ignored work on Harbinger Down). I love Dawn of the Dead, believe me, I do, but he certainly isn’t being beaten out by Tom Savini’s body of work. And that isn’t to disrespect and say that all of the artists that I just mentioned are bad, they’re the best in the game! But Rob Bottin was just that much better.
This inevitably invites the counterpoint: “But it wasn’t just Bottin! Stan Winston and his people were the ones who worked on the Dog Thing to give Bottin’s crew a break, and that’s the best monster in the movie!”. To which I say: look me in the eye and tell me the Dog Thing sequence is better than the Palmer Thing sequence. That’s not even counting the Norwegian Thing, both Norris Things, and the absolutely masterful final creature work that was the Blair Thing. The only reason Bottin and his people didn’t win Academy Awards for their work was because they got jumped by E.T., The Dark Crystal, Conan the Barbarian, and Blade Runner all at the same time at the Oscars. It’s just a consequence of being released during the best year for movies ever.
Okay, Now We Can Talk About Dean Cundey
But of course, these effects are then supported by another true legend: Dean Cundey. Selling people on Rob Bottin being the greatest effects artist of all time, isn’t nearly as difficult as advocating for Cundey, who despite an impressive catalog of filmography, slowed down in the back half of his career. He’s often overshadowed in conversations when it comes to The Thing; it’s always talk of Carpenter’s directing, Bottin’s effects, and Ennio Morricone’s incredible soundtrack up front, and rarely any of Cundey’s work. He isn’t spoken about in the same breath as John Alcott or Michael Ballhaus, cinematographers whose work is associated with prestigious cinema because of their proximity to great directors.
Cundey might not be the director of photography your Martin Scorsese’s or Paul Thomas Anderson’s went running to, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he was the most important cinematographer in horror history, just for his work with Carpenter and Spielberg. He helmed three of the most influential films in all of horror with his lighting and camera operating: The Thing, Halloween, and Jurassic Park. The man’s fingerprints are automatically on the cultural DNA of all slashers, most practical effects-driven horror films, and the biggest gateway horror franchise in film history.
The Dream Team That Made The Thing Perfection
Cundey has gone on record saying that despite Carpenter’s input, he was effectively given free rein to light and frame The Thing. The man didn’t just know how to shoot effects to make them evoke true disgust from the audience, he was able to manipulate every aspect of the shot to terrify. His sixth sense cinematography wasn’t just for lighting and playing with shadows, but for the speed of camera movement, the power of his blocking, and for having a complete grasp of communicating texture and temperature.
And temperature is the soul of The Thing. John J. Lloyd’s production design of the research station and the great white expanse around it feels just as bone chilling as the film’s antagonist, thanks to Cundey. There isn’t a single flat shot in the thing, not a moment that doesn’t feel dynamic, and it’s because of Dean Cundey.
Now, all this being said about Bottin and Cundey, they are far from the only ones who synthesized this structurally perfect organism of a movie. Every bit of Todd C. Ramsay’s editing splices the film’s scenes together to move perfectly in-time. David Lewis Yewdall’s sound design and how it gave a voice to the horrors on screen will be etched into people’s brains forever. The point is that everyone, every single person who had a hand in making the film, helped make the movie flawless.
Like the cells of the thing from another world, each crew member on John Carpenter’s The Thing moved in concert with the next, in unison, to create the greatest sci-fi horror of all time. So, is it any wonder why 40 some years later, the film still has us all captured?
