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.
Jigsaw and the Torturous Vision of American Individualism
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 Political Climate That Shaped 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.
American Identity, and the Enduring Appeal of Jigsaw
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?
Vigilante Justice and Jigsaw’s Brand of 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.
Jigsaw’s Philosophy and the Myth of Punitive Redemption
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.
Saw X and the Immortality of the Jigsaw Ideology
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.
Jigsaw, the Self-Made Man, and American Political Mythmaking
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.
Beyond Jigsaw: Community, Mutual Aid, and Horror’s American Lesson
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.
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Henry Selick’s return to the director’s chair after Coraline, represents righteousness, anti-authoritarianism, and the subtle art of not giving a fuck. With the support of Monkeypaw Productions and Jordan Peele in the writers’ room, Wendell & Wild crossed the cult classic finish line with a new round of applause from the wide intersections of punk rockers of color. A community, might I add, that historically has never stood to be disrespected.
Who Are Wendell & Wild?
The title refers to a witless pair of demon brothers, voiced by Peele and former Key & Peele co-star Keegan-Michael Key. In its early stages, the pair, along with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett), would lead the story. To explore themes of navigating trauma, anti-capitalism, gentrification, and how our justice systems set Black youth up to fail, though, Katherine “Kat” Koniqua Elliot (Lyric Ross) had to have taken the helm.
Kat’s character design forced a shift in Wendell & Wild’s sound. Heavily inspired by Brooklyn’s Afropunk festival, her hair is green, she rocks facial piercings, what I imagine are a pair of Demonia boots, and a DIY school uniform. The social commentary already aligns with the framework of original punk values. Why not make it a 3-for-3 and line it with the real world soundtrack of Black punk, as a young one reclaiming the righteousness left by punks before her. When we first meet the Elliott family, Kat and her father are seen wearing matching Fishbone band tees while their song “Ma and Pa” plays underneath. This small detail stands out, as punk these days is commonly hereditary, and used to teach positive righteousness in communities of color; not always simply born out of rebellion.
Henry Selick, Fishbone, and the Afropunk Connection
What the general public failed to see under the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, was the strong allyship between the art of Selick, and generational Black punk movements. His love of the sound led him to direct the music video for Fishbone’s “Party at Ground Zero” in 1985, and his appreciation for the Afropunk next gen basically created the look and idea of Kat. Selick and music supervisor Rob Lowry knew that “punk songs offer more than energy and rebellion; they show the deep connection between Afro-Punk Kat and her father, Delroy, a first gen Black punk fan”. Delroy isn’t present for Kat’s journey, but his boombox is, allowing his songs of Black punk to drive and support his daughter through a system we know wasn’t meant for us to succeed.
After the death of her parents, Kat acts out, and lands in the “Break the Cycle” program, offering benefits to struggling schools from the government when admitting troubled youth. She realizes her position as a pawn for cash immediately, but carries on. Her first day at Catholic school is decorated by legendary Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, chanting “I am a poseur and I don’t care. I like to make people stare” as the nuns in the hallway plug up their ears in judgment of the alternative. Styrene’s vocals mirror Kat, from her stubborn nature to her unapologetic vibrancy, and right back to her (almost) fragile confidence.
Black Punk Soundtrack Breakdown: Songs That Define Kat’s Journey
Even more than dressing a scene with a song that fits, Kat’s character development is literally narrated by the sounds of her boombox. Her boost of confidence navigating hell, earth, and the system is echoed by the lyrics of generational punk Black women. “Young, Gifted, Black, In Leather” by Special Interest is not only an affirmation, but a window into Kat’s understanding, and foreshadowing into the hellmaiden she was born to be. “Every night the law is on my back. That’s why we fight, ‘cause we are young, gifted, Black, in leather”. Tamar-kali’s “Boot,” and “Fall Asleep” by Big Joanie offer the same, while throwing an “I told you so” at the erasure in a genre Black folks had a large hand in creating back in the day.
If I were to break down every weighted needle drop in this 105 minute runtime, you’d need some eyedrops. The toughest track moment takes place during the confrontation between private prison company Klaxon Korp and the locals of Rust Bank, soundtracked by “Wolf Like Me” by TV on the Radio. Even if Rage Against The Machine is the only punk name you know, it’d be impossible to ignore the feeling of how integral Black punk is to the soul of this story. I don’t mean to get preachy on you, but besides the hell of it all, you might still be able to relate off-screen.
Black Punk Representation and Why It Still Matters
I would like to be able to say “many have tried, few have succeeded” to wrap this up, but the truth is, Black punk is fighting monolith status when it comes to representation. Shazam any of these songs- the low play count despite the community fame, and street cred that runs for decades is problematic. Punk is a tight community that relies heavily on the “iykyk”, leaving room for misconceptions on what it’s about, and the undeniable fact that Black punk is larger than you think. It’s not just an edgy sound you can brood in your dorm room over. It’s a vibrant, independent lifestyle filled with war cries of freedom of expression, power to the community, and sticking it to the man. Fuck the prison system. Wendell & Wild got it all correct.
Don’t miss a beat. Listen to Kat’s playlist, straight from the boombox.
The Horror Press Podcast Episode 57: Backrooms & Jigglyspot
‘Undertone’ Review: A24’s Scariest Since ‘Hereditary’
‘Silent Warnings’ (2003) Review: An Unknown UFO Gem
Mami Wata and the Untapped Stories of Water Spirits in Horror
Southern Black Gothic Films and Where To Find Them
Four Seasons of Fear: Queer Holiday Horror Anthology from Stacked Deck Press Coming Soon
Yes, ‘Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2’ Does in Fact Rule
The Black Punk Framework of ‘Wendell & Wild’
The Price of Admission is Death in ‘The Last Matinee’ (2020)
What Does Modern Black Horror Say About The 2020s?
‘The People Under the Stairs’ Review: A Brilliantly Bizarre Horror Classic
‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ and The Story of William Afton Explained
Slappy Was the Blueprint: How the Dummy from Goosebumps Became A Horror Icon
Glen and Glenda: Don Mancini’s Reverence for Queerness in ‘Seed of Chucky’ (2004)
‘Truth or Dare’: Who Did it Best?
V/H/S Franchise Ranked, Best to Worst
Everything You Need to Know About Jason Voorhees
The 11 Most Disturbing Horror Movies Ever, According to an Actual Horror Fan
[REVIEW] ‘Cherry Falls’ (1999) Brittany Murphy Shines in This Cult Classic Slasher
