Editorials
What Do Current American Political Values Have In Common With the ‘Saw’ Franchise?
You might wonder how a guy plans out, gets the materials for, and constructs a chair that scalps you to death and still believes he’s doing the right thing over the course of the 2 months it would take to do that; you might also wonder why you still like him for it. But Jigsaw, his origins and motivations, are something American horror audiences have been taught to engage with positively for years now, not just from when they started watching horror movies, but from a very young age. I believe their philosophy and approach to justice is why the Saw movies make up the most politically American franchise in all of horror.
Jigsaw, John Kramer’s Jigsaw specifically, is a wonderfully controversial character.
Opinions on him are heavily polarized: you either think he’s a complete crackpot with a flawed moral compass and horrible methods (hey, that’s me!), or you think he’s a justified if not profoundly broken person who targets flawed individuals and genuinely believes he’s doing the right thing (hey, maybe that’s you!). Either way, as horror fans you still kind of love him, and you still definitely love the Saw movies.
You might wonder how a guy plans out, gets the materials for, and constructs a chair that scalps you to death and still believes he’s doing the right thing over the course of the 2 months it would take to do that; you might also wonder why you still like him for it. But Jigsaw, his origins and motivations, are something American horror audiences have been taught to engage with positively for years now, not just from when they started watching horror movies, but from a very young age. I believe their philosophy and approach to justice is why the Saw movies make up the most politically American franchise in all of horror.
Through its view of a flawed America, to the man who thinks he can solve it by tying people to killing machines, to his disciples, to the very origins of the series itself and the political climate it came out in. Through and through, Saw is an excessive, torturous vision of American political ideology and the concept of the American man (or American woman, or American corrupt cop who basically turns into the Terminator by Saw 3D depending on what you identify as).
And I don’t mean this in the sense of that old joke that the Saw movies couldn’t happen in Europe because Jigsaw’s preventative healthcare would have caught the cancer early, and his wife wouldn’t have miscarried in that clinic robbery because she would have been on extended maternity leave. When I say the Saw movies are about American political ideology and the potential of the American person, I’m talking about the sense of American individualism we are all taught to identify with; and more specifically, Jigsaw’s individualistic philosophy as a response to a broken America.
THE POST-9/11 HORROR OF SAW
To talk about Saw, we have to start at the spawning ground of the political climate that Saw came out of and why people identify with it so much. Isaac Feldberg of Paste Magazine, among many other film scholars, posits that the Saw movies were an artistic release of distress in the face of the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ the Bush administration and its political cohorts waged in the Middle East. It saw an unprecedented paradigm shift in the media, including publicizing images of torture out of Abu Ghraib and associated sites, that may have made fictional torture palatable in comparison to the real suffering audiences were now being exposed to by a 24/7 media cycle intent on shocking you to the core and capitalizing on your fears.
The Saw films became laughably more insane as things went on so it’s easy to forget, but the first film was mostly grounded (if you ignore a terminal cancer patient laying on the ground shock still for more than a day). It focused on unrelenting psychological and physical torture and, more importantly, on the idea of being surveilled by an unseen force and monitored closely, all in the name of making the world a better place and improving the lives of its citizens no matter how brutal you had to be to do that.
For many of us growing up and finding our sense of self in a post-9/11, post-Patriot Act world where that sense of surveillance heightened to another level, our identity as Americans became much more challenging to grapple with than previous generations. Saw ended up being weirdly poignant on a thematic level when it wasn’t busy making people chop off their own hands to fill a meat bucket to unlock a door. It resonates even today as bipartisan politics do little to elevate the most disenfranchised among us.
So, with all of this resonance and as fun as the films were on a surface level, its often yearly release became a beloved Halloween pastime, and the creation of James Wan and Leigh Whannell quickly became a genre staple. But this still doesn’t answer: it is entertaining and close to home, but why are Jigsaw’s motives so compelling to so many people outside of that entertainment?
NEW: JIGSAW BRAND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM!
The Saw series is in many ways an offshoot of one of my favorite film subgenres, despite not being an action film. I’m talking about the vigilante films of the 70s and 80s, films like Death Wish, the crux of which intersects critiquing the American legal system’s failures with a literally and figuratively violent sense of individualism. The idea that any one person, no matter what walk of life you come from or political party you identify with, can do what the system isn’t willing to do. You are special! You can take out the morally wrong scum one bullet at a time! If you are sad and have a gun, you are ontologically good! Kill your sadness with firearms!
This message is of course far from intersectional, or logical, or even acknowledging of how the world actually works; it doesn’t address the systemic issues that cause random acts of violence and the destruction of low-income communities that allows violent and unstable individuals to be formed as people. It is all about using violence to solve the world’s ills, trying to force simple solutions onto complex issues. And they’re just films, but films can do two major things: popularize ideas, and impact other films.
Stefan Kriek, a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, writes about the political liberalism of the Saw films in terms of the rampant individualism running through these movies. He touches in his article, “Saw: Liberalism’s Favorite Franchise”, on how the various Jigsaws have had a pretty unfortunately consistent record of targeting drug addicts, reducing the impetus of their addiction to unfortunate personal choice and moral failings on the individual level. The most famous example is Amanda Young, the second and arguably favorite of all the Jigsaws. Not only someone struggling with addiction, but with self-harm, who dies as a result of breaking her promises to John Kramer and rigging the tests to fail in Saw 3. She jumps ship on the individualistic ideas of Jigsaw, and is punished for it.
On an actual, textual, in-universe level, Jigsaw’s philosophy is a panacea that makes its users better. Jigsaw is the antidote to the ills of bad individuals because the ones who take up the mantle and follow the rules of the game are the “best” individuals: they possess almost unlimited funds to operate, have near superhuman prowess with machinery and medicine, and some even display raw physical capability. Most importantly, they employ a sense of uniquely punitive American justice that considers extreme physical and mental trauma as the one-size-fits-all rehabilitation program. It even works, considering Saw 3D heavily implies that a bunch of trap survivors become apprentices to Doctor Gordon, donning pig masks and becoming Jigsaws themselves. They conquer their demons, and can now help spread Jigsaw brand American individualism to others, one trap at a time.
Consider then the most hated character in the Saw franchise. Not Hoffman, the murderous cop boogeyman who disgraces the legacy of Jigsaw and eventually gets punished for it (a fitting example of how it’s not John Kramer’s ethos that ruins things, but people failing to live up to the code that do so). No, the most hated is Jeff Denlon from Saw III. He is everything the Jigsaws are not: mindlessly angry and ungrateful, failing to save others, impulsive, and depicted as slovenly even by trap victim standards. Fans of the franchise hate Jeff, mostly because by the third film, Jigsaw hits a turning point and begins to be coded as an anti-hero by the filmmakers, and by proxy the audience.
Jeff is the most unlikable character because he is portrayed as a villain against the power of Jigsaw the individual, despite being understandable in his misery. And by the time Jeff kills John, it is ultimately a meaningless effort; Jigsaw has ascended to immortality, through his apprentices and his worldview. John Kramer becomes a household name, with a considerable number of civilian fans as seen in Jigsaw.
Though Saw X is chronologically the second film in the franchise, it is the teleological endpoint of the series as the latest film; it’s a full-on vigilante chase into Mexico where Jigsaw constructs his most elaborate ruse yet to punish a ring of medical scammers with brain surgery puzzles and giant radiation machines. He even walks off into the sunset like a cowboy riding out of the western, with a kind of found family. Jigsaw and company go on to take on abusers, cheaters, racists, scammers, the entire privatized healthcare system, other corrupt cops, and anyone and everyone who opposes their specific cure-all or fails their tests. Nothing is too big for the individual to tackle when they live and die by John Kramer’s (saw)blade.
THE POLITICAL MYTH OF JIGSAW
So ultimately, what is Jigsaw when all is said and done? Political scientist and author Alex Zakaras extensively writes about the origins of American individualism, and he views the growth of the ideology as being tied to political myths. Political myths, he says, are how we decipher and simplify the diverse nature of modern politics. One such myth, Zakaras sites, is “the self-made man”:
“For over two hundred years, this myth has taught us that our country is uniquely fluid and classless and that individuals invariably get ahead through hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance. It tells us, moreover, that Americans are a bold and enterprising people with the resolve and self-discipline to chart their own course in the world.”
Jigsaw is the fictional extension of the self-made man myth, but taken to the extreme. He says you can singlehandedly escape not only your circumstances, but take down all opposition, no matter how large. It’s not false that people can make something great of themselves through perseverance, but Jigsaw is a warped embodiment of this idea. It is the kind of thing you imagine as a child, one person saving the world from itself, ignoring all the circumstantial factors and context you operate in.
In a nation where most people are sick of being disappointed by systems with feet of clay, run by disappointing politicians around them (ones who are sometimes flawed and other times outright dangerous), it isn’t hard to understand why the idea of Jigsaw can be entertaining or empathized with. Jigsaw can be captivating philosophically when you’ve been taught that the individual, not the collective, is the solution to your problems. And if you find yourself unlearning that instinct, Jigsaw as an idea becomes more absurd than any traps or surface-level motivations you ascribe to him.
No one person, not even yourself, is going to save you.
In unprecedented times like these, you need to find community and help one another. You need to put your faith in mutual aid and learning from one another, because the system is certainly not set up for one vigilante to knock it down. Under this lens, the Saw movies really have become something more than the “torture porn” early critics derided them as: they have become, whether intentionally or accidentally, pure cinematic Americana. And in that Americana, an accidental lesson on putting your faith in others instead of ideas.
As a horror fan, I tend to think about remakes a lot. Not why they are made, necessarily. That answer is pretty clear: money. But something closer to “if they have to be made, how can they be made well?” It’s rare to find a remake that is generally considered to be better than the original. However, there are plenty that have been deemed to be valuable in a different way. You can find these in basically all subgenres. Sci-fi, for instance (The Thing, The Blob). Zombies (Dawn of the Dead, Evil Dead). Even slashers (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, My Bloody Valentine). However, when it comes to haunted house remakes, only The Woman in Black truly stands out, and it is shockingly underrated. Even more intriguingly, it is demonstrably better than the original movie.
The Original Haunted House Movie Is Almost Always Better
Now please note, I’m specifically talking about movies with haunted houses, rather than ghost movies in general. We wouldn’t want to be bringing The Ring into this conversation. That’s not fair to anyone.
Plenty of haunted house movies are minted classics, and as such, the subgenre has gotten its fair share of remakes. These are, almost unilaterally, some of the most-panned movies in a format that attracts bad reviews like honey attracts flies.
You’ve got 2005’s The Amityville Horror (a CGI-heavy slog briefly buoyed by a shirtless, possessed Ryan Reynolds). That same year’s Dark Water (one of many inert remakes of Asian horror films to come from that era). 1999’s The House on Haunted Hill (a manic, incoherent effort that millennial nostalgia has perhaps been too kind to). That same year there was The Haunting (a manic, incoherent effort that didn’t even earn nostalgia in the first place). And 2015’s Poltergeist (Remember this movie? Don’t you wish you didn’t?). And while I could accept arguments about 2001’s THIR13EN Ghosts, it’s hard to compete with a William Castle classic.
The Problem with Haunted House Remakes
Generally, I think haunted house remakes fail so often because of remakes’ compulsive obsession with updating the material. They throw in state-of-the-art special effects, the hottest stars of the era, and big set piece action sequences. Like, did House on Haunted Hill need to open with that weird roller coaster scene? Of course it didn’t.
However, when it comes to haunted house movies, bigger does not always mean better. They tend to be at their best when they are about ordinary people experiencing heightened versions of normal domestic fears. Bumps in the night, unexplained shadows, and the like. Maybe even some glowing eyes or a floating child. That’s all fine and dandy. But once you have a giant stone lion decapitating Owen Wilson, things have perhaps gone a bit off the rails.
The One Big Exception is The Woman in Black
The one undeniable exception to the haunted house remake rule is 2012’s The Woman in Black. If we want to split hairs, it’s technically the second adaptation of the Susan Hill novel of the same name. But The Haunting was technically a Shirley Jackson re-adaptation, and that still counts as a remake, so this does too.
The novel follows a young solicitor being haunted when handling a client’s estate at the secluded Eel Marsh House. The property was first adapted into a 1989 TV movie starring Adrian Rawlings, and it was ripe for a remake. In spite of having at least one majorly eerie scene, the 1989 movie is in fact too simple and small-scale. It is too invested in the humdrum realities of country life to have much time to be scary. Plus, it boasts a small screen budget and a distinctly “British television” sense of production design. Eel Marsh basically looks like any old English house, with whitewashed walls and a bland exterior.
Therefore, the “bigger is better” mentality of horror remakes took The Woman in Black to the exact level it needed.
The Woman in Black 2012 Makes Some Great Choices
2012’s The Woman in Black deserves an enormous amount of credit for carrying the remake mantle superbly well. By following a more sedate original, it reaches the exact pitch it needs in order to craft a perfect haunted house story. Most appropriately, the design of Eel Marsh House and its environs are gloriously excessive. While they don’t stretch the bounds of reality into sheer impossibility, they completely turn the original movie on its head.
Eel Marsh is now, as it should be, a decaying, rambling pile where every corner might hide deadly secrets. It’d be scary even if there wasn’t a ghost inside it, if only because it might contain copious black mold. Then you add the marshy grounds choked in horror movie fog. And then there’s the winding, muddy road that gets lost in the tide and feels downright purgatorial. Finally, you have a proper damn setting for a haunted house movie that plumbs the wicked secrets of the wealthy.
Why The Woman in Black Remake Is an Underrated Horror Gem
While 2012’s The Woman in Black is certainly underrated as a remake, I think it is even more underrated as a haunted house movie. For one thing, it is one of the best examples of the pre-Conjuring jump-scare horror movie done right. And if you’ve read my work for any amount of time, you know how positively I feel about jump scares. The Woman in Black offers a delectable combo platter of shocks designed to keep you on your toes. For example, there are plenty of patient shots that wait for you to notice the creepy thing in the background. But there are also a number of short sharp shocks that remain tremendously effective.
That is not to say that the movie is perfect. They did slightly overstep with their “bigger is better” move to cast Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role. It was a big swing making his first post-Potter role that of a single father with a four-year-old kid. It’s a bit much to have asked 2012 audiences to swallow, though it reads slightly better so many years later.
However, despite its flaws, The Woman in Black remake is demonstrably better than the original. In nearly every conceivable way. It’s pure Hammer Films confection, as opposed to a television drama without an ounce of oomph.
There are only so many times I can get away with burying the lede with an editorial headline before someone throws a rock at me. It may or may not be justified when they do. This article is not an attempt at ragebaiting Scream fans, I promise. Neither was my Scream 3 article, which I’m still completely right about.
I do firmly believe that Scream 2 is, at the very least, the last Scream film I’d want to watch. But what was initially just me complaining about a film that I disregard as the weakest entry in its series has since developed into trying to address what it does right. You’ve heard of the expression “jack of all trades, master of none”, and to me Scream 2 really was the jack of all trades of the franchise for the longest time.
It technically has everything a Scream movie needs. Its opening is great, but it’s not the best of them by a long shot. Its killers are unexpected, but not particularly interesting, feeling flat and one-dimensional compared to the others. It has kills, but only a few of them are particularly shocking or well executed. It pokes fun at the genre but doesn’t say anything particularly bold in terms of commentary. Having everything a Scream movie needs is the bare minimum to me.
But the question is, what does Scream 2 do best exactly? Finding that answer involves highlighting what each of the other sequels are great at, and trying to pick out what Scream 2 has that the others don’t.
Scream 3 Is the Big Finale That Utilizes Its Setting Perfectly
Scream as a series handily dodges the trap most horror franchises fall into: rehashing and retreading the same territory over and over. That’s because every one of its films are in essence trying to do something a little different and a little bolder.
Scream 3 is especially bold because it was conceived, written, and executed as the final installment in the Scream series. And it does that incredibly well. Taking the action away from a locale similar to Woodsboro, Scream 3 tosses our characters into the frying pan of a Hollywood film production. Despite its notorious number of rewrites and script changes (one of which resulted in our first solo Ghostface), it still manages to be a perfect culmination of Sidney Prescott’s story.
I won’t repeat myself too much (go read my previous article on the subject), but 3 is often maligned for as good a film as it turned out to be. And for all of its clunkier reveals, and its ghost mom antics, it understands how to utilize its setting and send its characters off into the sunset right.
Scream 4’s Meta Commentary Wakes Scream from a Deep Sleep
As Wes Craven’s final film, Scream 4 has a very special place in the franchise. It was and still is largely adored for bringing back the franchise from a deep 11-year sleep. With one of the craziest openings in any horror film, let alone a Scream film, it sets the tone for a bombastic return and pays off in spades with the journey it takes us on.
Its primary Ghostface Jill Roberts is a fan favorite, and for some people, she is the best to ever wear the mask. Its script is the source of many memorable moments, not the least of which is Kirby’s iconic rapid-fire response to the horror remakes question. And most importantly, it makes a bold and surprisingly effective return for our main trio of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale, whose return didn’t feel trite or hammy when they ended up coming back to Woodsboro for more.
Craven’s work on 4 truly understands the power its predecessors had exerted on the horror genre, both irreverent in its metacommentary and celebratory of the Scream series as a whole. The film is less of a love letter to the genre and more of a kicking down of the door to remind people what Scream is about. 4’s story re-established that Scream isn’t going away, no matter how long it takes for another film, and no matter how many franchises try to take its place.
Scream 5 & 6 Is Radio Silence’s Brutal and Bloody Attitude Era
Put simply, Scream 5 and 6’s strong suit was not its characters. It was not its clever writing. The Radio Silence duology in the Scream series excelled in one thing: beating the hell out of its characters.
Wrestling fans (of which there is an unsurprising amount of crossover with horror fans) will know why I call it the Attitude Era. Just like WWE’s most infamous stretch of history, Radio Silence brought something especially aggressive to their entries. And it’s because these films were just brutal. Handing the reins to the series, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillet gifted a special kineticism to the classic Scream chase sequences, insane finales, and especially its ruthless killers.
All five of the Ghostfaces present in 5 and 6 are the definition of nasty. They’re unrelenting, and in my humble opinion, the freakiest since the original duo of Stu Macher and Billy Loomis. Getting to hear all the air get sucked out of the room as Dewey is gutted like a fish in 5 was still an incredible moment to experience in theatres, and it’s something I don’t think would have happened if the films were any less mean and any less explosively violent.
So, What Does Scream 2 Do Best Exactly?
So now, after looking at all these entries and all of their greatest qualities, what does Scream 2 have that none of the others do? What must I concede to Scream 2?
Really great character development.
Film is a medium of spectacle most of the time, and this is reflected in how we critique and compliment them. It affects how we look back on them, sometimes treating them more harshly than they deserve because they don’t have that visual flash. But for every ounce of spectacle Scream 2 lacks, I have to admit, it does an incredible job of developing Sidney Prescott as a character.
On a rare rewatch, it’s clear Neve Campbell is carrying the entirety of Scream 2 on her back just because of how compelling she makes Sidney. Watching her slowly fight against a tide of paranoia, fear, and distrust of the people around her once more, watching her be plunged back into the nightmare, is undeniably effective.
It’s also where Dewey and Gale are really cemented as a couple, and where the seeds of them always returning to each other are planted. Going from a mutual simmering disrespect to an affectionate couple to inseparable but awkward and in love is just classic; two people who complete each other in how different they are, but are inevitably pulled back and forth by those differences, their bond is one of the major highlights throughout the series.
Maybe All the Scream Films Are Just Good?
These three characters are the heart of the series, long after they’ve been written out. I talk a big game about how Scream 3 is the perfect ending for the franchise, but I like to gloss over the fact that Scream 2 does a lot of the legwork when it comes to developing the characters of Dewey, Gale, and especially Sidney.
Without 2, 3 just isn’t that effective when it comes to giving Sidney her long deserved peace. Without 2, the way we see Sidney’s return in 4 & 5 doesn’t hit as hard. All of the Scream movies owe something to Scream 2 in the same way they owe something to the original Scream. I think I’ve come to a new point of view when it comes to the Scream franchise: maybe there is no bad entry. Maybe none of them have to be the worst. Each one interlinks with the others in their own unique way.
And even though I doubt I will ever really love Scream 2, it has an undeniable strength in its character writing that permeates throughout the whole franchise. And that at the very least keeps it from being the worst Scream film.
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