It came, it sawed, it conquered

It has been dismissed as 'torture porn', but the hugely profitable 'Saw' film franchise, which ends with the release of 'Saw 3D', has become a cultural cornerstone, writes TARA BRADY

TWO COMPLETE strangers – a doctor and a photographer – wake up in a strange subterranean bathroom. Both are manacled to filthy pipes by the ankle. Neither can recall how this came to pass. The body of a suicide victim lies between them in a pool of dark blood. The corpse holds a gun in one hand and an old-fashioned cassette player in the other. The strangers soon find tapes in their respective pockets, which explain that each man must kill the other or both will be left entombed in this windowless place. They have eight hours to complete their tasks.

It gets worse; the diabolical architect behind this scenario has also kidnapped the doctor’s wife and daughter. And worse again: in order to free himself and save his family, the doctor will firstly have to saw off his own foot.

Thus began Saw, a twisty 2004 horror-thriller and an apposite springboard for Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), the iconic antihero. A terminal cancer patient who decides to make those around him more appreciative of what they have, Jigsaw is unique among movie monsters in his methodology.

Law enforcement officials – variously played by Danny Glover, Donnie Wahlberg and Costas Mandylor – have hunted him as a serial murderer, yet, over the course of seven movies, Jigsaw has never actually killed anyone.

He has, however, constructed elaborate booby traps that do the job on his behalf.

A moralist by the standards of any major religion, Jigsaw’s baroque devices are specified to ensure that the worthy and the noble will survive (though perhaps not with a complete contingent of limbs) while the unworthy, the callous and the corrupt will perish in squelchy, horrid ways.

Behind the onomatopoeic Grand Guignol lies a classic Hollywood Cinderella story. Back in 2003 James Wan and Leigh Whannell, two Australian students, had to defer their salaries to bring Saw, their first US feature, in under its minuscule $1.2 million budget. Happily for the young director and screenwriter, they signed away their fee for a share in the profits.

And what profits. To date, the Sawfranchise has generated seven films, two video games, a best-selling graphic novel, 30 million DVDs, major theme park rides at Thorpe Park and Universal Studios and around $750 million in box office receipts. It is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the most profitable horror franchise of all time. Not bad for a film that was originally scheduled for a straight-to-DVD release.

And now, the end is near. On Friday, the seventh and final instalment of the Sawfranchise, Saw 3D, opens worldwide. For fans, it's a mixed blessing: Sawmay have defined their Halloween for most of the new millennium, but even the most ardent Jigsaw admirers will freely admit that the last two instalments have lacked the punch of their predecessors. Saw VIwas the first in the sequence to gross less than $100 million.

For everyone else, the event will pass unnoticed and unmarked. Despite its popularity, the Sawfranchise has received very little attention in mainstream media, save hysterical shriek-pieces concerning so-called "torture porn".

It is true that the films are not aimed squarely at the faint of heart. Yet to dismiss the Sawfilms thus is to dismiss one of the major cultural cornerstones of the decade. From the get-go, like Harry Potteror Twilight, the sequence has amounted to more than a mere billion-dollar industry. Indeed, between high concept successes (Eli Roth's Hostelseries), cheap and cheerful knock-offs ( The Collector, Are You Scared?) and innumerable Scary Movieallusions, Wan and Whannell's creation has come to define its own genre.

Even those who have studiously avoided the franchise's discombobulating gore cannot have escaped its grasp. Zep's Theme, Saw's signature tune, currently plays over sports broadcasts and children's TV shows. Billy, Jigsaw's creepy puppet alter-ego, remains a best-selling all-ages Halloween costume and action figure.Elsewhere, Saw's stylistic tics have been plundered for use in game shows of the Fear Factorvariety.

The franchise has, moreover, maintained a tenacious grip on the zeitgeist. In episode five, property developers and crooked bureaucrats are left to duke it out for survival. There is, here and elsewhere, something terribly contemporary about Jigsaw’s Jacobean moralising. Combining the smarts of Hannibal Lecter and the smooth, soft delivery of a meditation guru, Jigsaw frequently plays like an extreme parody of a manual lifted from the Mind Body & Spirit section. The reverse beartrap of his devising may indicate insanity, but the timbre says crystals and gardening centre.

In fact, as the series has progressed, Jigsaw has developed into an impressive cheerleader for tough love: imagine Oprah and Dr Phil but with engineering skills and razor blades and you're most of the way there. (Perhaps Dr Phil even acknowledged as much when he appeared in the Sawsection of Scary Movie 3.) Similarly, fans are drawn from a very precise demographic: typically, but by a narrow margin, they are female, and almost invariably they are aged between 19 and 25. Academics have speculated about this fanbase, citing 9/11, George Bush, gender inequality and catharsis.

One might equally join the dots between a perceived powerlessness among young adults and a moralistic killer who, enfeebled by testicular cancer, must act from the confines of a wheelchair.

THERE ARE, HOWEVER, FAR MORE traditional and obvious explanations for Saw's clout with Generation Meh. Framed as an old-school matinee series and constructed around killer plot twists, cliffhangers and chronological tweaks, the series often plays like a particularly addictive soap opera. Jigsaw, it should be noted, died as long ago as Saw III,yet still features in each instalment as a quirk of the sequence's temporal devilishness.

It’s hard, too, not to recognise something ancient about the way audiences cheer as Jigsaw’s victims – drug addicts, corrupt cops, indifferent medics and those who seek to hide their light beneath a figurative bushel – meet increasingly sticky ends. Perhaps it’s merely an echo of such Shakespearean era delights as bear-baiting or cockfighting. Or perhaps, like the classic westerns of old, our violent, crazy world demands a violent, crazy hero to sort it all out on our behalf.

Either way, when Jigsaw takes his final bow at the end of this month, he’ll be dead but not forgotten. Did somebody say prequel? As Jigsaw himself might say: “Let the games begin.”

Saw 3Dopens in cinemas on Friday