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?
Last year for 420, the great Sharai Bohannon hit you with the Top 5 Stoner Horror Movies on streaming. To celebrate 420 this year, we’re expanding our scope with horror movies to watch when you’re super stoned. There is a difference, you see. Movies don’t have to be about stoners in order to appeal to the righteously baked. Let’s jump right into it, before that edible kicks in.
5. Hausu (1977)
The only reason Hausu is ranked so low is that you may not speak Japanese. If you don’t, subtitles will likely be a struggle to keep up with. However, you don’t really need subtitles to keep up with Hausu. Obayashi Nobuhiko’s surrealist classic isn’t about plot. A witch is sucking the youth out of schoolgirls by killing them one by one. It’s not hard to parse. What Hausu is really about is giving you the brain-scrambles in every possible way.
Scenes as simple as schoolgirls getting on a bus are presented in a kaleidoscopic, colorful barrage of imagery. So imagine how it looks once the story actually gets balls-to-the-wall nuts. We’re talking characters being eaten by pianos and turning into piles of bananas. It’s wild, and it’s impossible to predict what’s around the next corner. However, the movie’s nonstop sense of fun is a safety net that should prevent you from getting too overwhelmed.
Hausu (1977) is currently streaming for free on Plex.
4. Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992)
Honestly, being stoned could only improve this latter installment in the Amityville Horror franchise. You might not be alert enough to notice just how low budget this haunted house sequel is. This will allow you to focus on just how bananas its goopy, special effects-heavy time travel story gets. Between the inscrutable character motivations and creative visuals, it’s dreamlike in the best possible way.
Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992) is currently streaming for free on Plex.
3. Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
There’s nothing better than a post-Elm Street sequel to a straightforward pre-Elm Street slasher. Wes Craven’s 1984 classic was a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart of the slasher genre. However, its supernatural premise meant that copycat filmmakers had to shift their priorities as the slasher boom continued. It doesn’t matter a lick that the original Slumber Party Massacre had no supernatural elements. Its sequel’s a straight-up musical about a dream killer bearing an electric guitar with a giant drill bit on it. You just gotta roll with it. This movie also features some gloriously gross, cheesy nightmare sequences that stand among the best of the Elm Street ripoffs. Nothing could possibly dilate your stoned pupils more than the “evil chicken” or “exploding pimple” sequences. It’s also just 77 minutes long. Even if you’ve overestimated how much awakeness you had left in you, you can get through it.
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) is currently streaming for free on Plex.
2. Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento’s Suspiria is probably the most intense movie on this list in terms of its horror elements. So be warned. However, its purity as a visual experience is unmatched in the horror genre. Many filmmakers have tried and failed to recapture its color-drenched nightmare logic. Everything in the movie, from the plot to the aesthetic, feels simultaneously bizarre and perfectly ordered. Of course that woman has fallen into a room full of barbed wire. Of course that scene of a corpse crashing through a stained-glass ceiling is beautiful enough to make you weep. Honestly, maybe being stoned will get you onto whatever plane is required to fully pick up what it’s putting down.
Suspiria (1977) is currently streaming for free on Kanopy and Plex (which is a friend to all stoners, apparently).
1. Killer Party (1986)
Killer Party is also a post-Nightmare on Elm Street slasher. However, the liberties it takes with the genre are even more unhinged. It’s simultaneously a sorority slasher, a college comedy, and… well, I shouldn’t spoil that last subgenre. It’s a lot of different movies at once, all of which are perfectly designed to appeal to the stoned palate. Plus, its opening sequence within an opening sequence within an opening sequence should unlock your galaxy brain headspace right away.
Honorable Mention: Idle Hands (1999)
This title was already on Sharai’s list, otherwise it would have been at the top of mine. Not only is it a movie about stoners, but it’s a damn delightful horror-comedy thrill ride. 1990s horror icon Devon Sawa stars as a lazy young man whose hand is possessed by a homicidal demon. Things only get kookier from there.
Someone calls you on the phone. Already, this is a nightmare, but we’re not at the scary part yet. Let’s pretend you answer it. They ask, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Your pulse races, sweat builds on your brow, and your voice begins to quiver. If you’re anything like me, this just became your favorite conversation ever. I love horror. The rush of a jump scare. The artistry of a well-executed kill. The familiarity of a formula and the thrill of upended expectations. Horror is malleable; there are at least as many fears as there are people on Earth, and my favorite subset is the Slasher.
What Defines Slasher Horror and Why It Resonates
What do I mean by Slasher? Not to be confused with slash fiction, which has its own merits, the dictionary definition reads thusly: a horror movie, especially one in which victims (typically women or teenagers) are slashed with knives and razors.
Simple. Clean. Anything but easy. For every The Strangers, there’s a The Strangers – Chapter Three. But the takeaway, at least my focus here, is that the killers in these movies are human, attack with everyday means, and therefore can be defeated by everyday means. And I find them extremely inspiring.
Supernatural Horror vs Slasher Horror: Where Hope Disappears
Hereditary is an astoundingly original and disturbing horror film with an ending that betrays everything that came before it. I absolutely loved jumping at every mouth click, the eerie presence of being watched by white-clad cultists, and a mother’s descent into madness brought on by generational trauma. I was all in! Then came the demon king Paimon. Any human connection we had, and the unrelenting tragedy the Graham family has had to endure, seems to have been for naught.
It is my contention that the film loses all of its dramatic umph the moment Toni Collette starts climbing walls and sawing off her head. You can’t beat a demon! You never had a chance. I love supernatural horror (my favorite series of any genre is The Evil Dead), but it does not leave you any room for victory, for the audience to think that “YES WE’VE WON” before having the rug pulled out from under once again (see Drag Me To Hell for the exception, not the rule). I like Midsommar more for that very reason; Florence Pugh’s Dani makes a choice. The horror comes because of human action, not an overpowering of it.
Why Human Villains Make Horror More Relatable and Beatable
People scare me. Aliens, ghosts, ghouls, imps, devils, and the like also scare me. But when a film’s villain is decidedly human, the horror hits harder because it can happen to us. Slashers deal with “the real” (again: knives, razors); they can be defeated. No film franchise better exemplifies this than Scream. In the first Scream, we see Sydney and the rest of the Scooby Gang kick/punch/evade Ghostface as he gets knocked down, falls, stumbles, and bumbles his way through the film while also scaring the ever-living crap out of some teens. These trips and slips add a layer of relatability to our evil purser.
I may not be able to see myself terrorizing an entire high school, but I sure know it hurts to fall down the stairs. Ghostface is the ur-example of defeatability. Yes, he gets up again, but part of the genius is that there typically are two (or more) people sharing a mask, so whoever just took a stomach kick or a tumble on the lawn probably has some rest time between games, as it were. This faceless evil is seemingly everywhere, popping out from any doorway and around every corner, but we can defeat it with a well-placed shove or a bullet to the head.
How the Scream Franchise Shows Horror Villains Can Be Defeated
Scream 2 followed much of the same suit (and taught us to never underestimate Laurie Metcalf). Give or take your suspension of disbelief about how good voice changers have gotten, the same could be said for Scream 3 and the return to form of Scream 4.
Where the franchise begins to lose its luster is in 5CREAM (pronounced as intended five cream). A fairly fun reboot until the appearance of one Billy Ghost Gruff. The moment we bring in ghosts (or visions brought on by blood memory, however they explained Billy Loomis showing up) into a slasher, out goes the fun and the understanding that this is something to be defeated.
Scream 6 has some great bits, but Ghostface doesn’t need a gun to scare us, and the less said about Scream 7, the better.
Horror Sequels and the Problem With Unkillable Villains
We want someone to survive. Not always (see any Final Destination), but if a horror film has done its job well, we should care about the characters and what has happened to them. That is, until we see them go through the same circumstances again and again and again, and this time with roman numerals.
Let’s take a look at Laurie Strode. In the original Halloween, she survives vicious attacks by Michael Myers, who is just a guy. A scary guy for sure. A guy with “no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong”. But a guy nonetheless. We see his face!
People forget that Michael’s mask comes off, and there in all terrifying glory is… a dude who looks like he gave himself the nickname T-Bone. “But what about when he is shot and falls out of a second-story window, he gets up again,” you scream at your computer, “doesn’t that prove he’s more than a man?!” That’s exactly my point. At the end of Halloween (1976), we can presume Michael will go die in the brush like an injured animal, with his disappearance serving as a stark reminder that evil is inside and around all of us. Roll credits. Cue that funky synth score and play us off, John Carpenter to never visit Haddenfield again… what’s that? Halloween was a huge success? Massive return on investment? Nevermind! Money, as they say, is the root of all evil, and that has never been more apparent than in the horror movie business.
How Horror Franchises Remove the Possibility of Victory
This is why Michael Myers came back for 6 sequels, 2 reboots, and 3 requels, not counting the solitary spinoff. Horror makes money, a lot of it. One of the best ways a new filmmaker can break in is to make a successful horror film (heck, I am trying it myself). But with the franchising comes expectations. We need bigger kills; a cast of fresh-faced future stars; our original protagonist needs to hand over the reins, but also be on call for every iteration. And the villain CAN NOT DIE.
If our face of the franchise is taken off the board, how else are we going to milk him for all he’s worth? This is how we go from Michael Myers: the escaped institutionalized murderer, to Michael Myers: the embodiment of evil, who can also infect others with it literally, not inspirationally (hashtag opposite of justice for Corey Cunningham). Or in simpler terms, they took The Slumber Party Massacre killer, who used a stolen power drill to kill with impunity, and made him the personification of rockabilly killer with a drill on an electric guitar who kills with a song in his heart and hips that don’t lie and can’t die in Slumber Party Massacre II.
Yes, objectively cool. But The Driller Killer is not someone you can outrun.
HORROR IS A MIRROR (THIS IS WRITTEN IN LIPSTICK AS SOON AS YOU GET OUT OF THE SHOWER)
Horror has the great opportunity to reflect. It is the most immediate of film genres. What is scary today can be made into a movie tomorrow. What was scary 3 decades ago is often still scary today. When we see someone in a mask with a knife in their hand, it’s perfectly understandable to run. Scream. Panic. But if in your escape, you throw a pot of hot coffee on them and they are scalded, you have a chance. You can win. And the first step in winning is believing you can.
Why Modern Horror Needs Survivable Stories Again
Horror should not always be about impossible situations. We want heroes we can root for because we see ourselves in them. We want to yell at the screen, “Don’t go in there!” because we want them to survive. Or know that we wouldn’t be that dumb to split up the group.
As horror has moved on from its slasher heyday and into “the monster is actually our trauma,” this unexpected consequence has taken a toll. Life feels incredibly hard right now because we are not seeing villains we can defeat.
The Hope at the Heart of Slasher Horror
To quote a GREAT slasher (yes, Predator is a slasher and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fabulous final girl), “If it bleeds, we can kill it”. If it bleeds, we can win. There is no great conspiracy; villains are dumber than they appear, and we’re stronger than we think.
So answer the phone, you’ll be alright.
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