I was guesting on an episode of my friends’ podcast, It Came from the Midwest, recently when one of the hosts, Aryn, asked me to talk about the queerness of the Saw franchise. I’m not going to lie: I fudged it. My mind went blank. Despite writing for a living, I momentarily lost the ability to translate a deeply held belief into words. If it had been Jigsaw asking me the question against the clock, I would have lost my test. Game over, bitch.

Aryn, thankfully, is more benevolent than Jigsaw. After listening to me waffle for several minutes, she stepped in to voice what I was struggling to communicate.

“I don’t even think you have to say it necessarily, because I feel it,” she said. “It’s there. You can sense it. You just know it’s different.” 

Saw is a Queer Franchise, IYKYK

Aryn is right: the Saw franchise is different, as are the most memorable characters from its world. Take the angry, apathetic loner Adam Faulkner-Stanheight (Leigh Whannell in Saw), an artsy boy on the outskirts of society who puts his trust in all the wrong men and gets attacked by a monster in the closet. Or what about that monster herself, Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith in Saw 1–3 and Saw X), who steps into her full lesbian power (and haircuts) after having a major reawakening? And how can anyone watch Dr. Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes) putting his hand on Adam’s cheek during the climax of Saw — Adam sobbing uncontrollably, their faces inches apart, lips quivering, Dr. Gordon making a solemn promise to come back for him — and not see it as the tragic conclusion of an enemies-to-lovers arc? (Cue Elle Woods throwing chocolates at the screen with a cry of “Liar!” How could you, Larry?) 

There’s just something about the Saw franchise that speaks to the queer community, and the franchise has taken notice. When Jigsaw hit theaters in 2017, the team promoting the tie-in blood drive — a tradition dating back to the very first film — ran an ad campaign called “All Types Welcome” to protest the Food and Drug Administration’s discriminatory abstinence rule for LBGTQ+ blood donors (a rule that wouldn’t be revised for another six years). By the time Saw X rolled around last year, the iconic Billy puppet was announcing “yes I stun” from Saw’s official Twitter profile. Over on TikTok, meanwhile, fans were speculating why the Lionsgate account would post a video featuring Jigsaw killer John Kramer (Tobin Bell) framed in the colors of the Bisexual Pride flag. 

Of course, we don’t need the marketing team to tell us that Saw is queer, because as Aryn so sagely articulated, we just know. The fic writers know it. The fan artists know it. And the creators of Saw the Musical: The Unauthorized Parody of Saw most definitely know it, too. 

Saw the Musical : A Play Where the Subtext Can Become Text

Created and produced by Cooper Jordan, from a book by Zoe Ann Jordan and with music and lyrics by Anthony De Angelis and Patrick Spencer, Saw the Musical wastes no time letting us know that Adam and Dr. Gordon would be in one another’s pants immediately if only those darn chains weren’t keeping them apart. Adam is recast as a slutty himbo twink with a pocket full of condoms and a head full of cotton wool and dirty thoughts. As for Dr. Gordon, he’s no longer just a distant father with a penchant for stepping out on his marriage. Now, he’s a horny closeted bisexual who cares more about his furniture than his family and who won’t pass up an opportunity to bend over a resident, portrayed by a blow-up sex doll.

Chain these versions of Adam and Dr. Gordon together in a bathroom and the sexual tension doesn’t so much build as explode. It’s camp, it’s raunchy, and it can only end in — spoilers, but duh — a surprisingly sweet on-stage kiss. Perhaps if the bathroom set didn’t look like hepatitis waiting to happen, it might have gone even further. Then again, Dr. Gordon is bleeding out at the time. It is based on Saw, after all. 

I was front and center for Saw the Musical off-Broadway in New York City around Halloween 2023. My editor asked me if I wanted to write something about it not long after and I agreed, but whenever I opened my laptop to do so, the words just wouldn’t come. 

It was the podcast all over again. Sometimes something is just so obvious that you can’t find the queer forest for all the gay trees. 

I think that what I most wanted to say but didn’t know how was that Saw the Musical’s very existence makes me happy. It’s nice to see a horror movie that was initially dismissed as mindless “torture porn” by many critics be reimagined as something silly and joyous and, most importantly, unabashedly, unquestioningly queer. It’s the thing many queer people already knew Saw to be, even if we didn’t quite have the words to articulate it. 

As director and choreographer Stephanie Rosenberg told NPR, the musical is “a love story that… people have wanted for 20 years.” We felt it. We could sense it. Saw the Musical just turns our intuition (and the film’s subtext) into text. Sometimes in the form of funny songs. 

Saw the Musical: The Unauthorized Parody of Saw is playing in New York City through June 23. The national tour kicked off in April. For tickets and tour dates, visit their website.

I’m an insect who dreamt he was a writer and loved it, but now that dream is over… the survey answers are in! 

After two weeks of waiting, we’ve finally compiled answers from Horror Press readers all over, telling us what they thought the nastiest, most traumatizing, and by extension, best horror movie bugs are. So without further ado, let’s get into those answers and see who made it to the top five!

THE RESULTS OF THE BUG SURVEY ARE IN!

Honorable Mentions: MOTHRA (GODZILLA FRANCHISE) and DEBBIE (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4)

I know most of you picked her because it sounded funny, but, votes are votes and you voted Mothra! It might be hard to believe, but The Guardian of Earth was adapted from a novel titled “The Luminous Fairies and Mothra” before she ever hit the big screen. From humble origins, the verifiable queen of the monsters has come a long way, so it’s only fitting to pay homage. 

There is one cheat answer I felt I had to acknowledge since Reader Andrew B. reminded me of it: one of the gnarliest deaths in all of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, the roach motel demise of Debbie Stevens. She’s not quite a bug, but the method of Freddy’s attack involves turning her into one and giving her a gooey, gross ending. It’s quite possibly the most meanspirited of any Freddy Krueger kill, and the fact that it involves the opening stages of a Kafka-esque bug body transformation just makes it so much worse.

Speaking of roaches…

5. THE COCKROACHES (CREEPSHOW, 1982)

“They’re Creeping Up On You!” is the final segment of Creepshow for good reason: the bugs are a show-stealing and skin-crawling experience you have to see to believe. The visual of cockroaches crawling their way out of someone’s mouth will make even the most hardened exterminators shudder, and to think it was all done with real cockroaches is mind-blowing.

You would think getting ahold of the little crunchy buggers would be easy. But Romero’s work on the Creepshow segment was a horrifying comedy of errors that involved sourcing and wrangling an astounding 20,000 roaches, with entomologists working on the film having to travel to Trinidad to crawl through a waist-high pit of them and bring back thousands through customs. If that’s not reason enough to qualify as some of the most traumatizing, I don’t know what is.

Many of you submitted roach-relevant stories that paired nicely, but none were as bad as what reader Nicole R. left in a simple one-sentence horror story: a giant cockroach landed on my face in the shower once. And here I thought I was unreasonable for hating closing my eyes while washing up.

4. THE GRAY WIDOWER SPIDERS (THE MIST)

Beyond The Mist’s notorious ending which we’ve discussed here before, if there’s one thing Stephen King fans remember from the Frank Darabont feature, is its monsters. From the ravenous barbed tentacles of the loading dock to the larger-than-life and impossibly tall Behemoth, there are few we’d actually want to meet. But the insects from Todash space that have infested the town of Bridgton, Maine are the worst of the worst, And none are as bad as the gray widower spiders.

While the scorpion-fly’s venom is like mainlining acid, that seems preferable to the various methods of destruction the gray widower can wreak havoc on your body with. Their webs can slice through organic material like butter, and if you’re unfortunate enough to end up trapped by them, you’ll meet a fate that makes a xenomorph chest-burster seem like a walk in the park: being filled with thousands of rapidly growing eggs. Rest in peace to that MP in the pharmacy. Nobody deserves that.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, on average, they’re the size of a German shepherd when fully grown. Good luck stomping one of those!

(RIP Julian Sands)

3. “THE GENERAL” AND HIS SPIDERS (ARACHNOPHOBIA)

Of course, it’s always the more realistic movie threats that sit with us. The gray widowers are bad, but I can reason away dog-sized spiders as being purely fiction. The leading spider of the movie Arachnophobia and his little eight-legged cohorts, however, are just plausible enough to keep me (and plenty of you who took the survey) awake at night—37.3% of us, to be exact.

We’ve even got a firsthand account from reader Jillian K., who relayed to us a lovely and truly horrifying story regarding her personal experience with spiders and the lessons that Arachnophobia has taught her: 

“Not many people know that I lived off-grid in an unfinished barn in the hills of Tennessee for two years with my now husband. During this time, we experienced a brown recluse infestation IN OUR BEDROOM. The General’s spiders remind me of how you need to approach life in the south – shake out all shoes; shake out all towels; definitely check your sheets; and while sweeping, be prepared to unexpectedly oust a massive recluse.”

Thank you, Jillian, for giving me a lifelong aversion to the state of Tennessee! Send all my love to the people of Nashville, because my enjoyment of the music will NEVER be enough to make me go there now. 

 2. GRABOIDS (TREMORS SERIES)

We can spend all day and night debating Graboid taxonomy if you want, but the facts are the facts: they’re big, dusty brown, and underground. They’re worms. And these worms won an impressive 38.8% of the votes!

And what’s not to love about the Graboids? These kaiju of great 90s American horror are sandworms from prehistory brought to the present day, and unlike most of the insects we deal with daily, a can of Raid simply won’t be enough. It takes high firepower and a lot of ingenuity to outsmart these creatures (or, at the very least, standing on a stable rock). On a visual effects level, Amalgamated Dynamics knocked it out of the park with their craft, using a mix of cable puppets, hand puppets, and quality animatronics to bring them to life.

While nobody mentioned it in their response, I must say that Doctor Jim’s death in the first Tremors movie always got to me the worst. It’s like combining all the elements of dying by quicksand with all the elements of dying by being eaten alive, and your loved one gets to watch! How’s that for “two for the price of one”?

 1. BRUNDLEFLY (THE FLY, 1986)

In some of his last lucid moments before succumbing to the final stages of his teleporter mutations, Seth Brundle expressed that he’d like to become the first insect politician. And if this were an election, we’d be having a half-man/half-fly for president!

Coming in with a whopping and landslide 59.7% of the votes, Brundlefly was the clear winner. The tale of Seth Brundle’s ambition and hubris is a tragic one, and his slow and painful downfall from the top of the world’s most important scientific development is an unforgettable tale—with an even more unforgettable monster as he slowly mutates into a horrific and melty insectoid creature. 

While the film is up for debate as being David Cronenberg’s finest work, the design of the Brundlefly and its execution on screen is undoubtedly special effects artists Chris Walas’ and Stephan Dupuis’ magnum opus. 

The design of the Brundlefly captures a distinct and depressing feeling of both primal fear and pity for Brundle’s predicament and the monster he becomes. It’s no wonder the effects here netted the film an Academy Award for Best Makeup. It’s a legendary creature, and rightfully earns its spot as the most traumatizing bug in all of horror.

Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for the next Horror Press survey to make your voice heard. And for the latest in all news horror movies, television, and more, stay tuned to Horror Press and The Horror Press Podcast! Happy reading, horror fans!