Once upon a time, Saw wasn’t meant to go to theaters. Lionsgate originally purchased James Wan‘s debut feature from the 2004 Sundance Film Festival with plans to send it straight to home video. But the studio decided to take a chance on it due to positive feedback from the festival circuit. Once it hit movie theaters in October 2004, Saw didn’t just succeed; it thrived. Despite being so vastly different from the norms for American horror up to that point, audiences were showing up in droves for Saw.
It wasn’t long before Saw proved to be far from an anomaly. Less than three months later, Lionsgate also released Eli Roth’s Hostel. Not only did it also feature gruesome graphic violence but, like Saw, it generated immensely strong box office results. Between these two movies, a new subgenre in modern horror had been born. Torture horror had come into its own as a major part of the American horror scene.
Of course, it wasn’t the first time a horror movie had established a notable reputation based on especially sickening violence. Despite getting popularized in the mainstream in the early 2000s, torture horror movies weren’t invented by Jigsaw. The precursor to torture horror was splatter films, which had their origins in the 1960s from the works of Herschel Gordon Lewis. Movies like Blood Feast were widely regarded as utterly repulsive but were eaten up by horror fans. From there, other foreign-language horror titles like Cannibal Holocaust continued to give moviegoers craving graphic violence something to chew on.
However, this kind of shocking brutality was largely limited in its mainstream appeal. Many of these films were relegated to midnight screenings and film festivals. Even legendary horror comedies like Evil Dead II and Dead Alive from future blockbuster directors Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson were confined to cult classic status. While mainstream movies weren’t totally devoid of ultra-violent fare, many of the precursors to the torture horror genre just didn’t get major U.S. distribution.
However, the films that came about in the wake of Saw had no problem landing major theatrical releases. Opening in thousands of theaters nationwide, these films had a domestic footprint that classic Gordon Lewis films could only dream of. This new wave of torture horror also tended to be much bleaker than the horror movies that had previously been successful in America. The comic archetypes popularized in slasher films were totally absent here.
Combined with an increased level of presence and a pervasively grim tone, directors like Eli Roth immediately established that their films would not sand the edges off with slapstick or dark comedy. The screams of agony from characters on-screen were meant to curdle your stomach. There was no punchline to be found to help make the sudden demise of human beings more bearable.
Torture horror depicted worlds of despair defined by bouts of extreme violence, and audiences couldn’t get enough. For example, most of the violence in the original Saw occurs offscreen. But audiences demanding more carnage ensured that the sequels would not exhibit such restraint. Future Saw installments would put the pedal to the metal when it came to on-screen depictions of violence. In the process, the bar for graphic blood and guts was raised progressively higher, keeping audiences coming back for more and more Saw sequels.
It’s always hard to explain why certain film trends resonate with moviegoers at certain points in time. Saw screenwriter and producer Leigh Whannell (who also plays Adam in the film) observed in 2010 that American sociopolitical elements of the mid-2000s may have a hand in making torture horror so popular in this era. “I think at the time Saw came out, the world was a very anxious place,” Whannell told The A.V. Club. “People were being confronted, especially here in America, with things that are difficult to face up to. Like the American government being accused of these back-room dealings, and giving orders to soldiers about how to treat detainees. Guantanamo Bay…I guess it can’t be a coincidence that all these extreme horror films were popular at a time when there was all this extreme stuff going on in the world.”
Whatever the reason, torture horror took off like a rocket in the mid-2000s, and studios were all too keen to give audiences what they wanted. New Saw sequels, each more graphically violent than the last, became annual fixtures at movie theaters every Halloween. Meanwhile, new torture horror fare like Captivity and The Collector began making their way into multiplexes, eager to become the next heir to the Saw throne. The torture horror genre even began spilling over into other strains of horror storytelling.
This included another hallmark of 2000s horror – remakes of classic horror movies. Even before Saw became something to emulate, newer titles like the 2003 reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre had ratcheted up the violence of their predecessors. Torture horror arguably accelerated this trend. Rather than adhere to the style of horror that had made these movies classics to begin with, new takes on titles like The Hitcher and The Hills Have Eyes began to resemble the torture horror seen in a Saw movie. Even the small screen began to take a cue from horror’s new favorite genre. In July 2009, Entertainment Weekly noted that then-future TV network FearNet was planning to center much of its programming around exploitative fare reminiscent of torture horror.
The dominance of torture horror was unquestionable in this period of cinema, but it ended up being the very definition of the old axiom “the candle that burns brightest burns twice as fast.” By the end of 2011, the Saw series had come to a tepid end while the third Hostel movie was released direct-to-video. What happened here? What led to the torture horror genre crumbling like somebody’s ribcage caught in one of Jigsaw’s traps?
Well, the reason was simply that the genre didn’t prove to be reliably lucrative. While the Saw sequels were steady moneymakers for years, the Hostel franchise ended up flaming out after just one sequel. Worse, new entries in the subgenre failed to make much of an impact on the box office. Turistas topped out at just $7 million domestically, Captivity could muster just $2.6 million domestically, and The Collector, despite being made by people involved in the Saw franchise, topped out at $7.7 million.
Even the Saw franchise eventually fell prey to the diminishing financial returns of the torture subgenre. Saw VI abruptly saw the saga sinking to a $27 million domestic haul, less than half of what Saw V had amassed just a year earlier. The originator of the torture horror genre was also the one that spelled the beginning of its doom. The demise of Saw VI didn’t just speak to audiences growing weary of torture horror, but also to another factor that solidified the diminishing presence of the subgenre.
Saw VI was overshadowed in its October 2009 release by the original Paranormal Activity. The kind of bolt-out-of-the-blue horror movie the first Saw had been back in 2004, the first Paranormal Activity established found-footage movies as the new genre of choice for Hollywood studios looking to make hip new horror films on the cheap.
It’s worth circling back to Whannell’s thoughts on the political relevance of the torture horror movie. While those films had flourished in an era of American history where the headlines were dominated by stories about torture, they may have been out-of-step with the tastes of moviegoers in 2009, eager to leave the anxiety of the early days of the War on Terror behind them.
Whatever led to this subgenre losing its stature as the king of horror, the book on the torture horror genre seemed to close once Saw 3D was released in October 2010. Marketed as the final film in the franchise, it seemed to indicate that, if Saw was packing things up and going home, so too was torture horror as a subgenre. Still, that doesn’t mean more extreme approaches to the horror genre have entirely vanished from movie theaters. Look no further than the recently released Spiral: From the Book of Saw, intended to relaunch the Saw franchise.
Granted, the shift in audience tastes is reflected in the marketing for Spiral, which has emphasized the presence of stars like Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson over intense violence. That’s a sharp contrast to the marketing materials for earlier Saw entries, which had posters promising that “there will be blood.” But the mere existence of Spiral in 2021 does suggest there’s still an audience for torture horror films and that a comeback for this genre is not entirely out of the question.
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