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.